Brooks MacdonaldReviews of brooksmacdonald.com

Recently received sound advice regarding my savings from their Financial Planning Director. Will continue to use and recommend.

Great service from Harmy Bains👍

I would not recommend this company to manage pension or other funds. I paid for their discretionary management service from mid-2020 to look after my cash pension fund. The total gain they achieved on the funds entrusted to them, in a medium risk portfolio, was under 5% over c 41 months - certainly less than inflation (and below the comparatives). It was particularly galling that at the end of 2021, following the post-covid ‘bounce’ in stock markets, the portfolio was showing a gain of around 20%. However, over the ensuing c 20 months Brooks MacDonald allowed this gain to simply drain away – I would say through inaction. Despite paying their fees to manage the portfolio there was no effort to protect the gain and in reality very little action of any sort. The fees I paid to them over 40+ months substantially exceed the gain achieved on the portfolio. This has seriously impacted on the ability of my pension fund to meet my (family’s) future needs. I moved my funds away from this company towards the end of last year. I wrote to the company to complain but was, as expected, ‘fobbed off’. In my opinion the problem is that the company lacks a commercial edge – the manager dealing with my funds seemed completely incapable of understanding how to protect a portfolio gain and seemed quite relaxed to see the whole of this gain wiped out. 19.04.25: Brooks MacDonald finally responded to this review at the end of February 2025 - 18 months after it was submitted! In their response they stated that somebody would contact me and, as at April 2025, I have heard nothing. This morning I have received a message from Trustpilot saying: "You’ve written a review for Brooks MacDonald, and they’ve asked for more details to better understand your experience. If you provide some extra information within 3 days, it’ll help them recognize your experience and respond. If we don’t hear from you, the company may not be able to recognize your review as genuine." This strikes me as an attempt by Brooks MacDonald ('BM') to remove this review which, sadly, Trustpilot is apparently assisting them to do. As my original review stated - I wrote a comprehensive letter to BM and it was their failure to respond to this that led to the review in the first place! After my experience with BM, I moved my funds and have been much happier with the management of my portfolio - I would not trust Brooks MacDonald with my pension funds ever again. In my opinion, their failure to manage my portfolio cost me a significant amount of my pension pot.

Lost £4000 in 3 years on medium risk. Not a real good investment!

i was with lloyds tsb which bml acquired in mid 2020 they renamed it brooks macdonald hif high income fund .. well we hesitated as we had been with lloydstsb for many years since 2010 ..well we read that they would be doing even better ,than lloydstsb . so we carried on with them . from december 2020 till April 2023 a little over 27 months they had lost us nearly 30% of our investments . they blame it on all sorts of ideas ,,some of which are totally fictional . ,. we normally saw previous to BROOKS ,LLOYDS would always stay on average 86 pence per share ..this was for many years . well look today at the share price 62 pence . so its a number of excuses they come up with ,we find its all fictional ,as why would a large company with knowledge let this happen to its clients .. reading other stories i understand why .

What about putting a bit of your pension in a higher risk category, our IFA said. seemed reasonable. We understood it was higher risk, so when we lost 20-30% (when all the trackers were only losing 10-20) we had to accept it. So we thought, well let's stay with them and see how they do in the upturn, and they've royally f'cked that up too! How on earth do 'professional' investors such as Brooks MacDonald manage to underperform the markets in both the good times and the bad! Of course, our fees didn't change. Stick with market trackers folks over the long term folks!!!

Their business model is buying up distressed funds and then suing any clients who seek the compensation they are rightfully due from the distressed fund. Having taken on the liabilities of, say, Spearpoint, one they bought in 2012, BM have spent the time since using the courts as their personal legal facility to minimise the compensation they rightfully owe to clients like me who lost money due to Spearpoint’s mis-management before their purchase. This conduct is illegal under various Acts, like the Companies Act and Insolvency Act. BM have had to settle out of court 8 times to my knowledge over Spearpoint alone, and likely more. All data are available not on google but on historic copies of google data. That is available via AI searches. The FCA are aware and have fined them, sometimes vast amounts, but as ever the fines are a seen as a “cost of doing business”. If you have been affected, watch this space for a group legal action. Their legal reps have no shame and have elected to defend the indefensible. The corruption is not trivial. The judge in my first hearing, DDJ Rippon, even turned out to have BM as a client of his law firm. You could not make this up and I’m reporting all this through the laborious processes at the JCIO. Needless to say a self-regulating legal profession is effectively unregulated, but the wheels of justice will eventually turn. All this will be exposed via journalists ultimately, and online - the FCA are being kept informed. The SRA and legal ombudsman are being handed all the information about the corrupt legal representatives. Not least a KC called Joseph Giret of 3 Paper Buildings. All involved parties will be exposed. It won’t be a small task. But it may soon result in group actions against BM which end the entire corrupt business model, and expose the entire infrastructure of corruption supporting them. Including Stephenson Harwood LLP and the judge’s law firm Teacher Stern LLP. The evidence is to be uploaded to a dedicated blog this summer. This is endemic rot in the City of London.

Lost money and a highly stressful experience We were with Brooks MacDonalds for four years. Across that time, we have seen nothing but downturn, high fees and subpar service. We were originally put on a product that was unsuitable for the size of our fund, which meant for years, we were paying more in fees than we should have. After incurring years of loss and high fees, we were then told that to continue our relationship, we would need to start paying an additional £2.5K per year. This was the final straw and we decided to pull our funds, around 15% down from our original investment level, for fear of them losing ever more. What a waste of time, money and energy. I would avoid them at all costs.