Investment Advice
Please contact us for full details on our independent investment advice service. We will be happy to advise on medium to long term investments which may include;
ISAs
Bonds
Unit Trusts and OEICs
Investment Trusts
Our Investment Process and Review Strategy
Successful investment management must acknowledge the risks that investors face when constructing and managing a portfolio. Risk is inevitable in life, and we cannot eliminate it entirely in the portfolios we manage. However, our robust investment process is designed to contain risk and volatility to acceptable levels and to ensure that your portfolio is managed within the risk tolerance agreed with you at the outset.
Setting financial goals is a smart choice and can be very rewarding. When you set a financial goal, you define what you want and develop a plan for achieving it. Instead of wandering aimlessly, you have something to strive for and a clear path for getting there. We will also discuss the objectives you have for your investment. For instance, do you wish it to produce an income or do you just wish for growth? If the investment is within a Pension, when do you wish to take the benefits?
We undertake an analysis of your tax situation and how the investment will fit in with this. For instance, will it be an investment within a Gross Income Investment, such as an ISA, or will it be a Net Income Investment, such as an onshore Investment Bond. It is important we know this in order that we minimise any tax that will be due on your investments.
Your attitude towards risk will have a major bearing on the type of financial products you should be considering and we make a detailed assessment of this at your first meeting. This is done by means of a Risk Profiling Tool and this can prove particularly valuable when couples are involved, because one partner can have a very different attitude towards risk from the other. It is therefore important that this is factored into any joint financial decisions made. The results of this assessment are not binding and it might be that you choose to have a different risk approach to some of your money. For instance, you may wish to invest some of your money into funds that are more cautious because you feel you may need the money in the near future. The opposite could also be true and you may consider investing some of your money in a higher risk investment to gain a possible higher reward.
Of course, at its simplest, reducing risk boils down to the age-old adage - don’t put all your eggs in one basket. For investors, that means diversification, or spreading investments across a range of assets. That is why the core philosophy of investing with Susan Fleck Associates Ltd is through multi-asset investing. Multi-asset funds have been available to retail investors since around 2002. As the name suggests, they invest in a variety of asset classes including equities, bonds, property, structured products and alternative assets such as hedge funds. That means that any underperformance from one asset class should be balanced by outperformance from another. Reducing investment risk is a clear advantage of multi-asset investing. But this diversified approach also reduces the volatility of investment returns. The chart below shows just how variable the returns from the main asset classes have been in recent years. Investing in several asset classes helps to ‘smooth’ returns, as the top-performing asset class today will not necessarily be the top performer tomorrow. So the secret of successful investing is to have a well-diversified portfolio, investing in numerous asset classes, based on your own attitude to risk. In other words, to adopt a multi-asset approach.