At Equerry Investment Management, we believe that whilst clients like making investment gains, those same clients dislike making investment losses more. The principle of preservation of your capital is important to us as is our overriding aim to achieve (net of all investment charges) attractive investment returns for you.
Two related considerations support our investment approach.
1. Compound interest
Compound interest is more effective when applied to a larger sum rather than a smaller one. As a consequence, the principle of preservation your capital is always an important consideration for us.
2. Investment losses are more damaging than they may first appear.
If your portfolio loses 20% of its value, it then needs to grow by 25% in order to restore its original value. Similarly, should the portfolio lose 50% of its value it then needs to grow by 100%. We are alert to this perennial snare every step of the way and believe that significant losses – even if they are infrequent – significantly reduce long-term compound growth rates. We also believe that large losses of this nature can have a telling psychological as well as monetary impact on investors.
Our portfolios are bespoke to you and offer a diversified range of investments primarily in collective investment schemes but can also include cash, equities, bonds and other authorised investments.
We adopt a ‘top down’ approach to aid us make decisions about the allocation of your portfolio amongst the various investment categories. In addition to a number of external sources and tools, our research draws on the global resources of Raymond James Financial. We also apply a ‘bottom up’ approach to help us select the assets we invest in on your behalf.
We believe in the merits of active investment management both on a strategic and tactical level. When we believe there is evidence of actively managed collective investment schemes producing excellent past investment performance, we are always keen to include these in our research.
Past investment performance is necessarily not a guide to future investment performance of course but we do believe in the merits and potential of seeking out active investment managers with strong pedigrees.
Should we wish to select a collective investment scheme and are not able to find evidence of excellent active management, we will consider using a passively managed collective as an alternative.
We track many collective investment schemes and securities on our watch list. From within this list, we focus on the investment opportunities that we feel are the best and select them from our core list.