Our investment approach
We take full discretionary responsibility for managing our clients’ portfolios. This continuous stewardship and ability to make changes has added substantial value for clients net of all fees.
The stages of our investment approach are:
- Understanding the client’s objectives - we believe that a suitable portfolio can only be designed with a full and detailed understanding of the client’s objectives. By limiting ourselves to a few, but substantial, new clients per year we can spend as long as it takes with the client to achieve this understanding.
- Arriving at a strategic asset allocation – many firms provide clients with pre-determined asset allocations. By committing our research department’s time as well as director level judgement to the analysis of the client’s financial objectives we can design a bespoke portfolio of assets most likely to meet these objectives.
- Making tactical changes in the asset allocation – we make occasional, but substantial, shifts in the asset allocation. Our investment research team conducts extensive analysis of markets, with a view to making adjustments to the long term portfolio when particular opportunities arise. These decisions have added significantly to performance.
- Selecting and adjusting the mix of fund managers to suit market conditions – we have a structured and sophisticated manager selection process, which starts with screening over 15,000 funds and reduces this to the few we choose. The managers chosen are under constant review and we adjust the mix of managers to suit market conditions. The combined purchasing power of our clients’ assets enables us to access funds at substantial discounts – often greater than the fees we charge. These savings and discounts are entirely passed on to our clients.
- Monitoring and managing the portfolio – our reporting looks back to the original client objectives set and also provides very detailed analysis of the asset class and fund manager performance. We monitor the portfolio constantly within a sophisticated risk management system, which integrates technology and judgement into each stage of the investment process.