Research
Multiple levels of research is conducted on a clients portfolio before anything even begins. We check the existing products for the basic features such as fees and charges, but we also delve into each product more deeply to look at the detail, such as communication methods, simplicity, ease of use. The final level is the investment assets and the manager of those assets, how do they manage the money, how has it performed given the market conditions.
A good example was recently a popular fund returned for the financial year about 15%, rather nice, but why was it -15% Growth and +30% Income, this was rather strange and would impact on client's tax returns, so we spoke to the fund manager and found out why and what impact it would have on the future of the fund.
Monitoring
Like in the above example the need to monitor the investments and changes in market conditions is very important. With the current hysterical market condtions changes can occur rather rapidly so the days of a set and forget balanced fund are gone.
Depending on circumstances our client portfolios are on a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly monitoring cycle, this involves the basic big picture checks (Eg: asset allocation,cash account surplus) and the investment specific checks (eg: performance issues, manager review)
Market conditions are review on most days (overseas and domestic) and reported weekly in our Sunday Summary Newsletter at the present moment I am tracking 17 market indexes.
Freedom of Cover
Diversity by Design
Simplify with Us
