Expert Wealth Management

Persistently skilled fund managers are a very rare commodity, hard to identify in advance and hard to live with over time. Anecdotes and examples of great managers are often used to justify active management, yet even some of the truly ‘great’ managers have failed to live up to their billing. Like the […]

The world, they say, is a global village. Nowhere is this truer than in investing. We firmly believe in taking a global approach to investing. But what does it mean to be a global investor, and why should anyone care? When we say we’re ‘investing in the global capital market’, we mean buying tiny bits of some 43,000 publicly listed companies across the world with a collective value of around £57 trillion!

Welcome to our quarterly returns bulletin for the end of June. First of all, we feel we should apologise for being a little tardy with this one. Our excuse is that we have all been away on our holidays and when not doing that, busy serving our lovely clients! This month, we’re going to turn our attention to the benefits of doing nothing.

It is human nature to look at an investment that has done particularly well and wish you had been invested in it. We all risk being dragged into ‘if only’ mind games: ‘If only I had put a £10,000 into Amazon in 2003, I’d be retired by now’.  ‘If only I had bought Bitcoin at £1…’. These thoughts are dangerous to investors, as this fear of missing out (FOMO) can tempt them into taking speculative risks, often based on a rear-view mirror perspective. Concentrated risks have concentrated outcomes, both good and bad.

The world of financial planning can be complex and technical. It's sometimes easy to lose sight of why having a financial plan is so important! We recently came across this amazing video of Doris Day, singing in the 1950's and felt it was an apt reminder of what we're trying to achieve in the Expert Wealth family. Have a look!

Systematic, evidence-based investing often results in very little activity in a portfolio. It is wrong to think that this is the result of a ‘set-and-forget’ strategy.

If you’ve read even a few of these bulletins over the last few years, you’ll have heard this before: We don’t do market forecasts and we don’t make asset allocation decisions based on current events or economic news. We are relentlessly focussed on helping our clients capture the long term returns of […]

December 2018 dished up a rather distasteful present for the holiday period. Many lines were written in the broadsheets about the global equity market falls, but were they really anything out of the ordinary? The challenge for investors today is that they have been spoiled by the run of strong returns since the Credit Crisis, with only one down year since 2008 until, that is, 2018.

As I write this briefing, it has just been announced that legendary fund manager, and founder of Vanguard Group, John (Jack) Bogle has passed away. I appreciate than many of you will not have heard of him; but it is estimated that thanks to Jack Bogle, investors have saved $175 billion in […]

Human beings are not well wired to be investors. Not only are we not very good with percentages - often accepting seemingly small percentage charges as immaterial - but we also grossly underestimate the impact of compounding these deductions from our portfolios over time.