Thursday, August 21, 2008

Prudent Investment Strategy

For the great majority of our wealthy clients, it begins with a fairly basic goal: provide your family with the lifestyle that you desire for the rest of your life and quite possibly for future generations.

We call the first meeting with our clients the Discovery. This is where we uncover exactly what Values you hold as priorities: what is important to you about your money.

Goals, challenges, opportunities: what you want to achieve with your money.

We talk about risk. What is at risk?

1) Not achieving the goals that you set.
2) Losing your money.
3) Running out of money.
4) Having to adjust your lifestyle.

So it is essential to minimize the risk.

How do we do that?

We create an investment strategy that focuses on Diversification:

1) by Asset Class (Asset Allocation)
2) Assets that have a low correlation to each other (less likely to move in the same direction)
3) Globally Balanced Portfolios

Diversification reduces volatility. Volatility, over time, can erode the compound annual return. You are investing to maximize your compound annual return over time because compounding returns over time is essential to the growth of your investments.

This is our challenge, especially in the very turbulent investment markets that we are negotiating at the moment.

We very carefully select experienced multi-asset class investment management who have a track record (over a significant period of time) that out-performs the corresponding Global Balanced bench-mark. We can buy the index (or a group of indexes) at a minimal cost, so if we ask our clients to pay management fees, they had better be getting value for those management fees. One of our consulting roles is to ensure that our clients get value.

Some of that value is also ensuring that the portfolio is systematically rebalanced and that we are maximizing tax efficiency to improve performance.

Our goal is to make sure that you reach yours. Growing your investment portfolio with a well thought-out strategy and ensuring that you are receiving value for what you pay us.

You will not get that from mutual funds.