The fund switch that mattered more than any other decision I made
I wrote up seven finance books a few weeks ago, and the two that mattered most — Bogle and Malkiel — both make the same argument from different directions: don't try to pick the winning slice of the market, buy all of it. I nodded along at the time. I'd already done the thing they were describing. I just hadn't noticed how badly the version of me from a few years earlier had done the opposite.
What was actually in there
Some years ago, a Junior ISA was opened for me, and — I assume on the advice of whoever set it up, since it certainly wasn't mine — the money went into the Vanguard FTSE UK Equity Income Index fund. A single country. A specific style tilt towards income-paying shares. A small SIPP started around the same time held the identical fund.
I have a statement from early 2021 that shows exactly how that was going: the Junior ISA down close to a fifth against what had been paid in, the SIPP down by almost as much. Not a market crash across the board — just one country, one style, having a bad run, at a moment when a different fund would have told a completely different story.
The switch
At some point I stopped being a passive owner of whatever fund someone else had chosen for me and became an active one — which, done properly, means picking something less exciting, not more. I moved the money, and everything since, into the Vanguard FTSE Global All Cap Index fund: every developed and emerging market, thousands of companies, no view at all on which country's economy does best over the next decade, because the fund doesn't need one.
The account structure changed too. The Junior ISA became a Stocks & Shares ISA once I was old enough to hold one directly, and a Lifetime ISA got added into the mix later. Different wrappers, same underlying instruction: stop betting on a country, own the average of all of them.
What actually happened
By the middle of 2025, the same style of statement told a very different story. The ISA up by more than a quarter against cost. The SIPP up by over a third. The Lifetime ISA, invested the same way, up by close to a third as well.
Read uncharitably, that's the whole article: switched from a fund that lost a fifth to a fund that gained a third, four years apart, so switching was right. I don't think that's a fair reading, and I'd rather say so than let the numbers do a sleazy job of arguing for me. Four years is not a backtest. 2021 was a specific bad patch for UK equity income. The years since have been a specific good patch for globally diversified equities, and especially for the US, which dominates that global fund's weighting. I got the direction right and a decent chunk of the outcome by luck, not foresight — nobody, including me, called the shape of the next four years back in early 2021.
What the switch actually bought me
The thing I'd defend, independent of how the numbers landed, isn't the return. It's that I no longer have an opinion baked into my portfolio about which country wins. The old fund was a bet, and not one I'd chosen consciously — it just arrived that way and I hadn't thought to check. The new fund isn't a bet at all, in the sense that matters: whatever happens to any single market, I own a slice of the answer automatically, without needing to notice, let alone be right.
That's a smaller claim than "global funds beat UK income funds," and it's the only one I'm actually prepared to defend. Bogle's line was buy the haystack, not the needle. It turns out I'd been holding a fairly narrow needle without registering that I'd made a choice at all — the switch was less an investment decision than the discovery that an unexamined one had been sitting there the whole time.
Not financial advice — I'm not qualified to give any. Past performance of any fund, including the ones named here, isn't a guide to future returns, and four years either side of a switch proves far less than it feels like it does.