Expert Wealth Management

One of the positive consequences of the current lockdown is that it does provide the opportunity to revisit a few of those old tasks, hobbies and pleasures that always seem to get put on the back burner in our busy lives. For some that might be picking up a new or re-reading a favourite book. Here is an example of the latter: in the early 2000s Nassim Nicholas Taleb published a wonderful book titled ‘Fooled by Randomness’ with the descriptive sub-title ‘The hidden role of chance in life and in the markets’.

It does feel as if the world is at an inflection point: step up to the challenges of global warming and other non-sustainable pressures on the Earth’s resources today or let our children and grandchildren reap the havoc of the melting ice caps; sea water level rises; deforestation and a decline in biodiversity; desertification and the potential social and migratory upheaval that will accompany it.

‘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.