Our investment philosophy

It is our firm belief that collective investments produce a better risk adjusted outcome for the end investor and as such we do not include individual shares in our portfolios.

Open Ended Investment Companies (OEICs), Unit Trusts and Investment Trusts run by well-resourced investment houses can attract the best talent both at a fund management level but also, and of equal importance, within their teams of analysts – essential when selecting investments.

A large part of our role as advisors is to select collective investments, from the thousands available, that we feel have the best potential to produce long term out performance for investors.

We believe active management is the best way to manage risk and ensure you have control over the desired outcomes. We avoid passive index tracking funds as feel investing in an asset simply because it appears in an index is not a sensible way to approach capital allocation.

We are also equally aware that we are investing our clients money and being advisory, rather than discretionary, means that you will always have the final say before any changes are made to your portfolio. Moving us away from the ‘black box’ opaque approach adopted by so many.

Before we invest anything in any of our portfolios, it is, in our view, essential that each clients risk attitude and capacity are carefully assessed and clearly understood. Our advice and indeed our investment process are for that reason inexplicably linked.

Portfolio construction

We start, from a position of construction, a top-down asset allocation target. That is deciding to which asset classes and geographies we are going to allocate capital. That could be equities (shares), bonds, property or alternatives. Geographically, we blend funds focussed upon individual regions with broader global approaches.

Once the asset allocation has been agreed we move on to select individual funds within each asset class to populate the portfolio.

In a world where investors have literally thousands of collective investments to choose from we believe in narrowing the pool and run a centralised lists of collective investments.

The list is contracted not simply by following the computer and selecting those with the best performance in any given year. Whilst of course we employ the services of third party data providers to construct out quantitative screens and models, we compliment this with a qualitative overlay, communicating directly both with those managers we recommend, and also those we are considering recommending to get a clear insight into their approach to managing a portfolio.

Given our proximity to Bristol (home to sizable institutions such as Hargreaves Lansdown) and our willingness to travel to investment hubs such as London and Edinburgh our access to fund managers to discuss their funds is excellent.