Investment Philosophy

Our Approach

Here are the core principles that underpin our investment process and philosophy:

• People deem investment advice as a forecast. The bad news is that we don’t believe we can forecast markets. The good news is that we are convinced that investors do not need forecasts.
• We believe in investing, not speculating. Whilst speculating can be fun you should not use investment capital to speculate.
• We do not believe there is merit in market timing and stock or fund selection. Our approach is clear in that we maintain a disciplined approach that helps our clients get from A-Z.
• There is a world of difference between speculating and investing and our process helps to reinforce the latter and remove the gambling from your investment experience.
• Over 90% of investment performance is derived from asset allocation decisions, not market timing or stock selection. Brinson, Beebower and Singer 1991
• Over the past 20 years, 82% of active funds failed to beat the benchmark FTSE All-Share Index (The WM Company (one of the world’s leading investment performance measurement businesses), April 2004)

We do not believe that active management strategies consistently add value for the individual investor. We believe that long-term investment objectives can best be achieved by maintaining a disciplined policy of asset class diversification targeted towards the establishment of ‘efficient’ portfolios for our clients within the overall risk parameters that they are able to assume. These goals can be best achieved by investing client assets in institutional asset class vehicles for the long term, supported by regular rebalancing to ensure that allocations stay within strategic parameters. Currently, the funds recommended, whilst being predominantly institutional asset class funds, include retail funds where we are unable to obtain access to an appropriate fund within a specified asset class. When these funds can  be replaced by appropriate institutional funds this will be done immediately any research is complete.

Ongoing research is brought together quarterly by our Investment Policy Committee where Smart Finanacial Planning and advisers from three other specialist adviser firms come together to share views and expertise to set the funds and weightings in each portfolio for the ensuing period.

You benefit from the pooled knowledge of these experts designing a portofolio of investments that as are as reliable and low costs as possible allowing you to keep as much of your retruns as possible.

Click on Your Tolerance for Investment Risk to see how it works for you.