Blog

Your portfolio represents your future. It is only natural to want to check how your investments are doing. How often you need to do this depends on the type of investor you are. Speculators who constantly buy and sell individual stocks will monitor performance frequently, perhaps daily. Those investing for the long term with robust

Over the longer term, being on course to meet your financial goals is the true meaning of success. The first aim is to grow or at least preserve the value of your portfolio after inflation over the medium term. This may not happen each year, but over a longer period, you would hope that to

The quick answer is ‘no’ for two main reasons. The first is that few investors invest all their money into equities. You need to have a lot of intestinal fortitude and patience to do this. It is more likely your portfolio will be a mix of equities and higher-quality bonds. The second is that whatever

In today’s markets, bond yields are low and those of high-quality bonds are the lowest. In addition, they could quite feasibly crash too with interest rate rises. So why have bonds in a portfolio? It is quite straightforward. Imagine you only hold equities with a portfolio of £200,000. The economy takes a turn for the

The second quarter of 2021 has seen most major markets continue on an upward path. For once, the UK, as measured by the FTSE 100 was not the laggard, as that prize went to Japan. However, in Q2 the FTSE 100 was still behind the overall global equity performance of 6.8% in sterling terms. This

Building an investment portfolio requires a mixture of investment science and common sense. The evidence suggests timing when to be in and out of markets (or sectors, or companies) is extremely difficult. It also suggests identifying a manager who can persistently beat the market is very hard to do in advance. We, therefore, focus on

We sometimes refer to the way we invest as mostly being a ‘systematic’ approach. It is our duty to do what is right for our clients. When investing, we build on a foundation of facts. This is because we believe we would be doing our clients a disservice if we did it any other way.