Investments: Why boring is best

On four occasions this week when I have been presenting our wealth management proposition to clients and professional connections, I have described our approach as ‘boring’.

As you can imagine the person sitting the other side of the meeting room table has shifted in their seat, put on a slightly puzzled look and sent out body signals and made inquisitive sounds that confirmed I needed to explain myself a little.

After all describing your wealth management approach as boring is a little unconventional to say the least.

So what do I mean by boring?

What I mean is that we adopt an approach where there won’t be any unexpected shocks in the future. Our investment advice process is designed to be a number of things:

-Understandable – we communicate it in plain English and in a way that is easy for our clients to understand;

-Transparent – there are no funds involved that don’t contain exactly what they say they contain (for example, if it is a UK equity fund it contains – surprise, surprise – UK equities);

-Straightforward – we don’t replace one risk with another (for example giving up equity risk and replacing it with counterparty risk);

-Cost effective – we use a combination of passive and actively managed funds to provide both good value for money and prospects for growth;

-Well researched – we use an in-house developed system to make sure that we only recommend suitable funds.

Our approach is never going to ‘shoot the lights out’; it will tend to protect against the worst of downsides rather than chase double digit returns.

What our wealth management process does do is to closely link our clients financial planning goals and objectives with their investments.

We never claim to be recommending the ‘best’ funds (no such thing actually exists) or the star performers (this years best generally turn out to be a future years not so best!). We recommend suitable funds that match the asset class modelling that we do for each of our clients.

Overall therefore we tend to be a bit on the boring side.

We find that our clients rather like to be bored by their investment portfolios.

Photo credit: Flickr/Elsie esq.