As part of helping individuals, trustees and businesses build their wealth by active
portfolio management, we have developed our Strategic Portfolio Service which is
designed to manage your pensions and investments on a quarterly basis.
This unique service was launched in early 2009 in response to clients’ requests for
more regular information on their funds. The extreme market conditions of 2007-
2009 have shown how the traditional way of managing portfolios with annual reviews
is not suitable for those clients who are serious about maximising their investment
returns.
The Process
The Strategic Portfolio Service is built around our Portfolio Management Strategy.
When it comes to investing money, whether through Pensions, ISAs, property or the Stockmarket, it is vital that you seek independent advice, not just on the funds themselves but also on the most tax efficient way of investing.
Here we set out the methods we use to advise clients on all matters to do with investments.
Our starting point is assessing a client’s attitude to risk, this is the most important issue, we either ask you to complete a questionnaire or ask a series of questions to determine acceptable levels of return. All clients have differing requirements, be it long term capital growth, short term income requirements or a combination of both.
Having agreed a client’s attitude to risk, we then recommend an appropriate asset allocation, ie a split of investments across UK Equities, International Equities, Property, Fixed Interest, Cash etc as appropriate.
This asset allocation is then used to help us to determine which Investment Funds best fit the investment portfolio. Depending on the funds available for investment, we usually recommend a ‘multi–manager’ Fund approach. This gives us maximum flexibility to choose the very best Funds from an extremely wide range of Funds on the Market. We prefer this approach rather than having to select a rather more limited range of Funds from one or two Insurance Companies. This method has proved to be much more effective, allowing us to obtain the very best performing investments for our clients.
We aim to diversify our client’s funds across separate areas to give a balanced approach, so that for example if Equities under perform, the fund is counterbalanced by other assets in the portfolio. We look for non–correlating Funds, without spreading the risk too far and wide, and look for consistently outperforming Funds.
We have four main risk categories for our clients:–
- Cautious
- Realistic
- Adventurous
- Speculative
Our investment committee, which consists of our Board of Directors and our Senior Technical Analyst is responsible for reviewing the past performance of Funds and Sectors, and sets specific guidance to all staff on how to design and arrange clients’ portfolios.
In selecting the best Funds, we take into account the historic performance of the Fund, the sectors in which it operates and also the quality of the Fund Manager itself. We use external research to arrive at our conclusions from, amongst others, Fund Managers, rating agencies, leading economists and the Bank of England.
With clients’ risk profiling and careful asset selection being key.
Clients using the Strategic Portfolio Service benefit from our regular monitoring of
markets, economic conditions, funds and their managers. Our Investment Committee
meet formally each quarter to discuss and agree what asset classes and investment
funds have done well over the previous quarter and how we should position the funds
for the next quarter. These fund changes are then communicated to clients via email
each quarter along with Specific Fund Factsheets, and an Investment Bulletin,
explaining the changes. The Strategic Portfolio Service seeks to outperform the more
traditional methods of managing your money by getting into the better performing
funds quicker and by coming out of the poor performing funds faster.
Click here for an overview of the process we use
Investment Portfolios
The Strategic Portfolio Service consists of ten portfolios graded according to risk,
with Portfolio 1 representing lowest risk and Portfolio 10 the highest. Each portfolio
is reviewed on a quarterly basis and adjustments are made to take account of changing
market and economic conditions.
We use a number of sources to help us with our research; amongst others these consist of:
- Leading economists
- Bank of England Reports
- Key Fund Managers
- Rating Agencies
- Actuarial Reports
Benchmarking
We feel it is very important to make sure we can demonstrate how our portfolios
perform compared to others; we therefore compare our funds against industry
standard benchmarks, and this information is published in our Factsheets.
Client Log-in
Clients using our Strategic Portfolio Service also have the benefit of being able to
log-in securely via our Website directly to their own policy to track the performance of
their own plan live.
Risk Categories
There are ten different risk categories you can select from, and we will help you with this process.
Click here for an explanation of the 10 different risk categories.
| 1 |
You are a very conservative investor, and are only willing to accept a very moderate risk to your investment. You understand that the potential for growth is small and over the long term inflation may reduce the real value of your money. |
| 2 |
You are a fairly conservative investor, you are seeking to minimise the effects of inflation and do not need access to all of your capital and are prepared to invest a proportion of your assets over the medium to long term.
|
| 3 |
You are a cautious investor and are looking for an investment where the return over the long term is expected to outperform cash deposit accounts although you do not wish to expose a large proportion of your investments to shares. You do not need to have access to your funds and are considering investing for the medium term.
|
| 4 |
You are a cautious to realistic investor and you are looking for a balance between risk and reward. You are happy to have a proportion of your investments linked directly to the stockmarket or commercial property, you do not need access to your funds and are prepared to invest for the medium term, ie five years plus.
|
| 5 |
You are a realistic investor investing for the medium to long term and understand that your portfolio will have a slightly more aggressive approach in its investment strategy. You are willing to accept that the value of your investment will fluctuate in value. |
| 6 |
You are a realistic to aggressive investor, and wish to include a higher proportion of equities in your portfolio. You will be taking a long term view of your investments with this approach (ie five to seven years). |
| 7 |
You are an aggressive investor and are willing to accept a high level of risk on your investment in order to achieve higher growth potential in the longer term. You understand that this approach will increase the risk of large fluctuations in the value of your investment. You are prepared to invest over the medium to long term (seven to ten years). |
| 8 |
You are a speculative, experienced investor, you are seeking to have a more aggressive growth strategy over the longer term (ie ten years plus). You do not need immediate access to your funds and understand that your portfolio may be subject to a high degree of fluctuation in value. |
| 9 |
You are a very speculative and experienced investor, you are investing for the long term (ten years plus) and are prepared to accept a high degree of risk in order to seek very high growth potential. You are willing to accept sharp day to day fluctuations in the value of your investments and the risk of losing some or all of your capital. |
| 10 |
You are an extremely speculative and experienced investor, your portfolio will consist entirely of equities on the basis of a high risk high return strategy, you are also investing over the longer term (ten years plus), you also accept that you have a higher likelihood of losing some or all of your capital in the process. |
