Wealth Management
Wealth can be destroyed more easily than it can be created. Often the threats to it are not immediately apparent, even to experts and regulators - recent years have resounded to the slamming of stable doors.
Unfortunately, we do not have a better crystal ball than anyone else, but we are conscious of this, and will take account of it when developing strategies for you to follow. Lack of certainty about what the future holds also makes us cautious, though this does not necessarily mean conservative. In our view, it is as important to preserve wealth as to grow it, although we hope that we can manage a bit of that too. We shall not promise to deliver investment performance which will ‘shoot the lights out’. Instead, we’ll seek to diversify your assets over all the main asset classes, and across a wide range of investment institutions, so that your overall position should remain sound, come what may.
In selecting investments for you, we shall bear in mind that the lower the costs of acquisition and ongoing management, the higher the returns you will receive, other things being equal. We shall also bear in mind that what did well in the recent past is unlikely to do as well in the near future – what goes up frequently comes down again! These two factors drive us to centre our recommendations on straightforward investments with low, transparent costs, understandable structures and investment policies, and lots of underlying diversification.
For equity investment, we favourlow-cost index-tracking funds, including exchange-traded funds. If we believe that you should pay off your mortgage, however, rather than invest in the stock market, we’ll tell you.