Expert Wealth Management

‘Its déjà vu all over again!’ Yogi Berra, famous baseball coach and part-time philosopher The recent announcement by M&G that it had taken the decision to suspend redemptions on its £2.5bn M&G Property Portfolio – after suffering ‘unusually high and sustained outflows’ estimated at £1bn over the past 12 months – is […]

‘One cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e. if history played out in a different way).’ Nassim Nicholas Taleb – Fooled by Randomness For some, waking up to the large Tory majority this morning will be […]

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!

There is always a temptation to fiddle around with a portfolio’s structure to try to position it ready for potential short-term global events, such as Brexit. Investors would do well to remind themselves that the core tenets of good investing hold true through all market conditions. It is also worth remembering that the efficacy of a portfolio’s strategy should be judged not on the post-event outcome, but in terms of the quality, validity and prudence of its construction discipline in the face of future market uncertainty. Portfolios are well-structured around inalienable investment truths, particularly the value of deep diversification.

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.

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.

Given the the media furore surrounding the investment markets in final quarters of 2018, we feel it important to review the performance of major asset classes to provide some long-term perspective that we hope every investor will find useful and even comforting.

Whichever way one voted, it is hard not to be dismayed by the shambles that is Brexit, concocted by all sides. In the event that any deal agreed gets voted down in Parliament, or there is no deal, there is a material chance that the government could fall. One or both of these events would come with great uncertainty. We set out three key investment risks relating to Brexit and how sensible portfolio structures can mitigate them.

Trump’s belligerence, China’s debt mountain, Putin’s malevolence, not forgetting Brexit and the prospect of a far-left leaning Labour Government: All this turmoil inevitably leads to concern over investment portfolios. Let's discover how well-structured portfolios are capable of riding out any storm.

The aim of this report is to demonstrate how the performance of EWM investment portfolios compares to that of other investment management groups. To do this we use Asset Risk Consultants (ARC) Private Client Indices.