Wealth Management
Our aim is to help individuals and organisations to manage their wealth in a sensible, straightforward manner. Key areas of our Wealth Management service include:
• Investment management
• Retirement planning
• Transfer of wealth between generations
There are a number of key steps to this process:-
- Understanding your needs
- Building an appropriate investment portfolio
- Managing performance and making changes
It is important that any investments made are consistent with your objectives and attitude to risk. By taking the time to understand your needs we can create a portfolio that fits your investment timescales for income, capital growth or sensitivity to market movements.
By monitoring the portfolio and keeping in regular contact we can ensure your portfolio evolves to suit changing investment conditions and your personal circumstances.
Understanding your needs
We offer our clients individual attention and individual advice based on a thorough understanding of your needs and objectives. This takes time and experience and in many cases we deal with several generations of the same family. We aim to establish long term relationships with our clients and believe that this enables us to give better advice.
Understanding Risk
Risk is a very complex area to define. Until recently many commentators have argued that cash is a risk free investment, however inflation tends to erode the real value of bank deposits over time making cash a poor long term investment. In addition recent events have highlighted the real risks that savers face in terms of falling interest rates, and capital risk through possible bank failure.
Over recent years, the financial services industry has come up with several attempts to categorise risk. Some of these schemes are extremely simplistic, categorising clients on a scale of 1 to 10 or even as low, medium, balanced or high risk. In our opinion these labels appear designed to protect the adviser rather than to help a client understand the inherent risks of an investment portfolio.
Our most fundamental criticism with traditional models of risk measurement is that they tend to be one dimensional, with clients being shoehorned into standard portfolios irrespective of their specific needs.
For these reasons we tend to look at risk under a number of headings: -
Underlying investment risk.
Investment timescale.
Known or possible liquidity requirements.
Financial position (e.g. other assets, business interests, cash generation or other requirements).
An investor’s experience and sensitivity to capital fluctuations.
Building an appropriate investment portfolio
As independent advisers we are free to select investments from a full range of those available. We believe that this gives our clients a more objective and balanced portfolio than simply investing their funds with a single investment group or stockbroker.
No individual fund management group is strong in every area and the success of investment strategies can vary depending on stock market conditions. By playing to their respective strengths we aim to build a balanced portfolio with a spread of different fund managers and different investment types. This is always done in conjunction with the client to ensure understanding of and participation in the agreed strategy.
We invest a great deal of time looking at and monitoring fund manager performance and were one of the first advisory groups to use the Lipper/Reuters Hindsight analysis system in the UK. The majority of this research is performed in house, using daily information across the full range of unit trusts, OEICs, life funds and pension funds. We also use these and other research tools to review alternative investments such as hedge funds and structured products.
Monitoring performance and making changes
Having selected a spread of suitable fund managers and investments we then continue to monitor their performance and to keep in regular contact with them so that we can keep up to speed with the positioning of the fund. By virtue of the funds we have under management we can generally gain direct access to senior fund managers and have private meetings with them.
We send regular valuations and investment reports to our clients and will alert you to any significant changes in a fund.