For our growth portfolios, we have a series of maxims that we use for investment selection. These are, broadly:
- In the absence of any reason to do otherwise, the cheaper the investment strategy the better. Lower fees mean more returns if everything else is equal.
- That said, our preference is for full replication strategies when selecting index tracker funds. This is because the lower costs associated with synthetic trackers often introduce additional risks for the investor that can be extremely difficult to quantify because of all the risk trading that goes on.
- We believe that asset allocation drives the majority of returns, hence our core growth portfolio is asset-allocation driven and passive to keep the costs down.
- We believe that all investments must have economic activity underpinning them. Although somewhat controversial, this means that we do not see things like gold as a suitable investment vehicle, as the commodity only increases in value if more people want to buy gold and not because of any fundamental change in what the gold is actually doing.
- This also means that we do not invest in crypto assets or foreign exchange. We believe that money can be made in these areas, but they are ultimately zero-sum games, meaning a huge amount of luck or insider knowledge is needed.
Our satellite portfolio is designed to be a bottom-up high-risk growth portfolio, meaning the funds selected are largely unconstrained in terms of asset allocation and should not be held without the accompanying core portfolio to offset the concentration.
The goal of our combined growth portfolio is to provide the low cost of a core portfolio of index trackers with the growth potential of a range of high risk active funds where the manager is allowed to select the investments that they think is likely to perform very strongly.
