Investment Philosophy
When making investment recommendations, we are guided by our four key principles:
- Keep it simple. Unless thereās a compelling reason to do otherwise, our approach will always be to keep things as simple as possible. This usually results in less cost and less risk.
- Keep costs to a minimum. We always try to use lower cost investments first. We tend to prefer āpassiveā investment funds rather than āactiveā alternatives. Ensuring costs are kept to a minimum should mean our clients keep a greater proportion of any investment returns that are generated.
- Minimise tax. Not only do high costs impact returns, but tax also plays a big part. Weāll analyse your circumstances and objectives, then recommend what we believe to be the most tax-efficient way to hold your investments.
- Less risk is better. Some people prefer to take more risk with their investments, but we would only advocate this after having answered this key question: āwhat level of risk is necessary to achieve your objectives?ā.
Here are the steps we follow to ensure successful investment.
We find out about your objectives in as much detail as we can. What do you want to achieve? By when? What kind of income or capital will you need? How important is inflation? How are you currently planning on achieving this?
We will identify your risk preferences and tolerances. These will feed through into our investment recommendations.
We will make some assumptions and test how likely you are to achieve your goals for a stated level of risk. We often do this through building a detailed and robust cashflow model.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that getting the asset allocation of your investments right is the key driver behind performance. We make sure we get this right; we will recommend a portfolio that we believe gives you the best chance of achieving your objectives, consistent with your attitude to risk.
We will make sure all the processing and paperwork is completed as efficiently as possible, ensuring all investment instructions are clearly and accurately represented and implemented.
An ongoing process
As far as weāre concerned, setting up your investment portfolio is just the first step.
We aim to monitor not only your investments, but regularly review and update your goals and objectives. We will also continue to review your attitude to risk, ensuring that any investments you have remain consistent. We know that ongoing advice, monitoring and reviews are key to investment success.