In July, Casterbridge Wealth won the highly-coveted ‘Best Discretionary Fund Manager’ honours at the 2020 Money Marketing Awards. All this week we are going to be sharing the ingredients that we believe helped drive this success…
In Part 3 we take a closer look at the investment experience of our small, but powerful, team
Experience that shapes investment decisions
Our investment team has more than 80 years of experience collectively, spanning four decades. But experience counts for little if it doesn’t shape your thinking and ensure better returns. We have learned to temper our enthusiasm when markets appear exuberant, and to accept that we cannot capture all ‘upside’ during periods when markets rise strongly. Chasing returns is never in the best interests of investors over the long term, and we believe that investors feel more comfortable with a reliable and consistent approach.
If there is one clear message Financial Advisers should take from the way we manage money, it is that we believe managing downside risks in both portfolio construction and fund selection can help smooth the returns experienced by clients, and helps us steer a steadier course through periods of market volatility.
As an example, the wealth of experience within our investment team led us to reducing equity weightings in late 2019. This decision came not from fears of COVID-19 (which was only just starting to become a health issue in China at that time), but was borne from decades of recognising the conditions that occur when investors appear overexuberant, and equity markets are unjustifiably expensive, and making the necessary portfolio adjustments.
This positioning served us well through 2020, providing our portfolios with an important element of downside protection, precisely at the time when investor sentiment went from excessively optimistic to overwhelmingly bearish. Our positioning ensured we were able to avoid some of the market volatility and heavy selling that dominated during March and April, and allowed us to increase our equity weightings when valuations began to recover.
Part 3: What No ‘Group Think’ – out soon…
Important Information
This update is for information only and does not constitute advice or a recommendation and you should not make any investment decisions on the basis of it. The views and opinions within this document are those of Casterbridge Wealth at time of writing and may change without notice. They should not be viewed as indicating any guarantee of return from an investment managed by Casterbridge Wealth nor as advice of any nature. Past performance is not a guide to the future. The value of an investment and any income from it may go down as well as up and the investor may not get back the original amount invested.
