Investment Philosophy
Investment Philosophy
Our belief: Investing can be easy ®
We focus on pooled investment products – Unit Trust, Investment Linked Policy and Exchange Traded Funds. Our mission is to help financial advisors generate profits for their customers when they invest in these products.
We seek to deliver value to by making investing easy. To do this, we look at investing in terms of controllable and non-controllable factors. We maximize focus on the controllable factors through a research-driven, evidence-based approach.
We study 25 years of equity and fixed income market history to answer the most important questions facing customers of pooled investment products. These questions focus on the trade-offs between investment horizon (controllable factor) and market volatility (uncontrollable factor), periodicity (controllable factor) and predictability (uncontrollable factor) and cost (predictable factor) , as well as outperformance (non-controllable factor).
Our approach is based on the Peter Bernstein adage that ‘risk in investing is inescapable and not an incidental anomaly’. This means negative events are going to happen and since we cannot predict them, they have to be accepted as part of the investment journey. We believe that investors must be armed with core investing skills which are simple, relatable to life experience and driven by the fundamental nature of asset classes.
Lastly, we believe in simplicity and elegance in presentation. Less is more. All our presentations are restricted to ten slides. This forces us to keenly prioritise the most important ideas and ensure that we are sharply focused on providing realistic and actionable inputs to both financial advisors and their customers.
The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.
― Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk