Investment Philosophy

We understand investment management is only part of the overall financial planning process but forms the important bedrock on which your financial goals can be achieved.

To align your financial goals with your investment outcome, our investment philosophy is centred on key investment principles:

Think Long Term

Our aim is to build and preserve your wealth over the long term and to tailor and adjust portfolios according to the prevailing investment climate. Portfolios are tailored by the expertise of our investment team based on long-term historic returns and valuations, not by short-term events or the latest headlines.  Attempting to time the market rarely pays off.

Keep it simple

Life can be complicated enough, but there’s no reason for investing to be.

We look to make timely decisions in line with each investment objective using regulated, liquid funds from a broad range of asset classes.

Manage Risks

There are many kinds of risks, but what they all have in common is it rarely pays to be on the wrong side of them. We seek to produce strong returns whilst managing investment risk and controlling losses through portfolio diversification as well as managing operational risk (such as illiquidity and regulatory risk) on an ongoing basis.

The application of our investment philosophy is overseen by our Investment Committee, which has appointed Asset Risk Consultants (ARC) as an external independent member.  Our robust and regular investment review process can highlight not just what is going very well, but also poor performance and unsuitable risks before they result in investment losses.  This provides you with consistent long-term returns that match your expectations.  At each Committee meeting we consider:

  • whether to leave the portfolios unchanged if there are no material reasons to alter the strategy

  • if prevailing market conditions make altering the asset allocation appropriate

  • We also manage a range of Passive Model portfolios.

This could result in the introduction of a new manager or investment company, or to increase or decrease an allocation to an existing manager or investment company.

We would also consider:

  • introducing new investment funds or strategies, potentially reducing fund costs of existing funds or managers, or to improve investment prospects.

  • If the asset allocation should be retained but the manager should be altered to reduce costs or improve investment prospects.

We also recognise that fees are a drag on performance and we seek to keep costs down where we can do so without sacrificing long term return.