Expert Wealth Management

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.

It is important to remember that equity market falls are an inevitable part of the process of building wealth through equity ownership. This note seeks to put market falls in perspective and offers some behavioural tips for surviving them.

The world today feels like a troubled place, with populism on the rise, Donald Trump in the White House, Kim Jong-un with his finger on a nuclear button, the looming Brexit cliff edge and the prospect of higher, even punitive, taxation of a Marxist-inspired Chancellor-in-waiting. We risk getting things out of perspective; it has always been thus.

As dawn breaks, the morning light reveals yet another political gamble that has not paid off for the dice roller.  The UK has a hung Parliament, with no party holding an absolute majority.  Such is the unpredictability of a parliamentary democracy.  If you ask the people of the UK what they think, […]

As investors, we have to contend not only with the erratic and unpredictable nature of markets but also the erratic and irrational way in which we think and behave. ‘‘If I have learned anything in my 52 years in this marvellous field, it is that, for a given individual or institution, the […]