Our Approach

Our Chief Investment Office is the bedrock of our strategic investment planning and tactical asset allocation process, enabling our advisory team to develop and manage client portfolios with surety and confidence.

Portfolio planning is based on our CIO team’s robust investment process, designed to optimise our clients’ long-term investment outcomes. This highly disciplined process is based on extensive research and monitoring of markets, economies, asset classes and fund managers.

In line with our collegiate approach, the data from this research is adopted consistently across the firm, being applied in accordance with each client’s individual circumstances and risk and return profile.

It means clients can rely on our team maintaining a calm, considered approach, even in times of short-term market volatility. Their focus is only on moves that may materially affect portfolio performance over the long term.

At the same time, our advisors take into account any changes in their clients’ circumstances or objectives, so individual portfolios can be adapted accordingly.

The research by our CIO team is conducted internally and sourced from global and domestic providers.

Discipline and rigour are critical to ensuring all relevant data is captured, analysed and distilled daily for our advisory team, enabling our long-term investment performance to be optimal and repeatable.

We also provide ample opportunity for clients to apprise themselves of the data and detail flowing from our research process, so their understanding is well informed.

Easily accessible information is available across different platforms providing fortnightly, monthly, quarterly and annual communications. Areas covered include financial markets, economics, asset classes and geopolitical news. The CIO team’s commentaries look to the past for context, report on the present, and include their forecasts for the future.

We develop tailored strategies focused on creating and preserving wealth for our clients.

To this end, our approach is to participate without bias in any particular source of return and mitigate the risk of macro trends such as interest rates, inflation or exchange.

In our view, asset allocation is the most important portfolio management decision an investor makes. This is supported by academic research* that shows more than 90 percent of the variability of a portfolio’s returns can be explained by the strategic asset allocation. Tactical management of the asset allocation and manager selection make up the remaining 10 percent.

We also believe in the benefits of prudently selecting and overseeing manager selection and, on occasion, tactically tilting away from the strategic setting when there is a clear investment reason to do so.