As Independent Financial Advisers, we are not tied to any specific provider and can advise you on products from the whole financial market. That means we’ll provide the most suitable solutions for your individual needs and circumstances.
Successful investing is hard, but it doesn’t require genius. In fact, Warren Buffett once quipped, “Success in investing doesn’t correlate with I.Q. once you’re above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.” As much as anything else, successful investing requires something perhaps even more rare: the ability to identify and overcome one’s own psychological weaknesses.
Over the past 20 years, psychology has permeated our culture in many ways. More recently its influences have taken hold in the field of behavioural finance, spawning an array of academic papers and learned tomes that attempt to explain why people make financial decisions that are contrary to their own interests. It is very difficult for an individual to make non-emotional decisions about their investments as money is a very personal thing. Individual investors tend to buy when the market is high and sell when the market is low. A good example of this is people tend to get more interested in things like gold and Bitcoin when they are at their highest levels, which would be a terrible time to buy, yet at the same time enquire about selling their investment portfolios during a stock market crash, when historically this would be the worst time to sell. There is also generally a compulsion to ‘chase a loss’ (where an individual will not want to sell an asset until it is in profit, even if that may never happen) and hold off on selling an asset when it is in profit in case its value rises further.
Hiring an investment professional who can take a cold, non-emotional look at your portfolio and advise accordingly can reap major benefits, including potentially greater investment performance.
We will create an investment portfolio based on your risk profile, strategic investment objectives and tax situation which is then managed by your own adviser who will monitor and review these with you on a bi-annual basis, though your adviser is available to you at any time. All final decisions are made by you when it comes to individual investment purchases or sales.