It is our job as your financial adviser, to use our experience of investor behaviour to coach you in achieving better results than you would without a professional adviser.
Left alone, investors often make choices that impair their returns and jeopardise their ability to fund their long term objectives. Many are influenced by market performance. Investors can be moved to act by fund advertisements that feature recent outperformance – as if the investor could somehow inherit those historical returns despite disclaimers that past performance is no guarantee of future returns. This performance chasing behaviour can seriously harm a client’s long term returns.
Our approach to encourage restraint is to have a formal, written investment policy or allocation guidelines for each client’s entire portfolio. An investment policy statement helps investors commit to a disciplined investment plan so that decisions are less likely to be swayed by emotion. We draft an investment policy statement for every client of this firm. This is the blueprint for how the portfolio should be managed.
One final point we have learnt from experience is that it doesn’t really matter how well we do in the good times, over the course of many years it is how you fare in the hard times that will determine success.