Our Investment Process

• Your thoughts, views, goals and aspirations
• Your views on risk, volatility and capacity for loss
• Your personal and financial circumstances

We will look at when you want access to your money and how much flexibility you require with your money. We’ll also take into consideration your tax position long before we give you any investment advice. All of these factors will allow us to work out the selection of investments available to yourself. It’s important any recommendations on investments we make to you are as tax efficient as possible.

Once your financial goals and expectations have been established, along with the timescale, our knowledgeable financial advisers can begin to work out the most tax efficient ways to meet your needs.

Depending on your circumstances, as well as looking at investing your money in Pensions, ISAs and Bonds, we could consider combinations such as life protection and critical illness policies.

We have trusted partners in the whole investment market place who offer a range of investment options, including:

• Individual Savings Account (ISA)
• Unit trusts/Open-ended investment companies (OEIC)
• Personal Pension
• Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPPs)
• Onshore Investment Bond
• Offshore Investment Bond
• Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)
• Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs)
• Enterprise Investment Schemes (EIS)

• The period of time you anticipate your investment to be over – it’s ‘term’
• The amount of money you want available in ‘reserve’ should you need it to pay for those unexpected expenses, such as a broken central heating system
• Your opinion on the potential for your investment earnings to grow
• The amount of money you want to invest
• If you have any debts
• Savings you have already for retirement
• Your overall opinion on investing
• Whether you want to take risk(s) to achieve your goals and your capacity for loss
• The importance of protecting your investment from the effects of inflation
• The question of ‘liquidity’: if you want to cash in your investments, how easy will it be to get your hands on your money?

To determine your approach to investment risk we’ll have to ask you a succession of questions. Every answer you give produces a score which is then totalled to calculate your personal tolerance for risk. This tolerance scale goes from 1 (low) to 10 (high). The number we calculate is called your risk profile score.

The risk profiling questionnaire we use is developed by Old Mutual in association with the leading actuarial consultancy Towers Watson, in line with the best industry practice and the guidelines laid down by our regulatory body, the Financial Conduct Authority.

Most of the terms often used to describe attitudes to investment can have different meanings, such as ‘cautious’, ‘balanced’ or ‘aggressive’. Because of this we will then explain to you what your risk profile score means.

If you have scored 1 in your risk profile score, this is low, which indicates we would recommend that you’d be best suited to investments such as cash or bank deposits which have a low volatility.

However if your profile score is 10, we would recommend a portfolio of investments which include emerging markets which have a higher level of volatility which also have greater potential growth in value.

We will need to discuss with you what your profile score means, to be sure you understand what the implications of this are on subsequent investment recommendations.

As well as this we’ll explain how investment growth and losses might be different between different levels of risk. This will give you a clearer indication of the outcome you could expect at each level. Through having this discussion with you it will enable us to agree whether your risk profile score is the same as your actual attitude to risk.

As our lives change so can our attitude to things such as risk and investments. We will carry out this same process at an annual review to see if your attitude to risk remains the same.

There are different asset classes available for you to invest in, these are;

• Cash or money market investments
• UK fixed interest
• International fixed interest
• Property
• UK equity and international equity

We base our asset allocation on models, leading global professional service companies who use long-established and proven sophisticated risk and analytics. Using the models enables us to plan, analyse and optimise a range of assets.

Even with our expertise, we must point out that we still can’t guarantee that the volatility range of a particular asset allocation will not occasionally be breached. Exceptional market conditions can be created because of the possibility of unexpected external events.

These investment options are very wide, including; Hedge Funds, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), Unit Trusts and Open Ended Investment Companies (OEICs) .They aim to achieve different things, therefore our expertise and appreciation of how they perform and may perform in the future is an important factor in choosing the right investments for you.

Depending on your personal approach to investments we will make the judgement to make an “active” approach to investment management or a “passive” one.

An active approach is highly involved, where a fund manager will typically look at the price movements of their stocks many times a day.

A passive approach is where a fund manager will invest in a stock when they have faith in its potential for long-term appreciation (growth). The cost of active funds is typically greater than passives.

Given the volatility around stock market investments, we believe that carefully selected active fund managers will typically be able to identify opportunities for ‘out-performance’ – doing better than average. Nevertheless we believe that the passive approach is, on occasions, appropriate.

Fund managers performance could be judged on the success of their past performance. However this is not necessarily a true indication of what they may achieve in the future.

It is far better to assess a fund manager’s performance on; why they achieved that and what process they used.

When we select a fund for a client’s investment portfolio we will look at set detailed measures such as;

• The amount of time the manager has been running the fund
• The size of the fund
• The amount of risk the manager has taken to achieve its performance
• What asset class it represents within the client portfolio

Centra is a powerful financial planning tool at our fingertips, as Centra delivers our clients the perfect marriage of quality personal financial advice and cutting edge technology.

Centra showcases a selection of multi-asset funds and Discretionary Model Portfolios that absolutely adhere to both the volatility and strategic asset allocation parameters of the Centra Risk Profiles – these solutions are risk-controlled. In addition to the risk-controlled investment solutions, Centra provides access to funds that have their own volatility and asset allocation parameters. Centra regularly assesses these funds against the Centra Risk Profiles to demonstrate their ability to deliver the appropriate outcome for clients – these solutions are risk-mapped.

From risk-controlled to risk-mapped active and multi-index funds and model portfolios, Centra has everything we need to build a compelling portfolio for our clients.

Firco will tailor make your bespoke investment solution utilising a diverse portfolio that has a proven track record of performance (in line with your risk and return expectations), and meets your risk profiling requirements, will ensure you continue to meet all your expectations.

As you can see, this combination of selection criteria enables us to confidently select suitable funds to build a strong portfolio.

Finally, when investing in any investment fund it is important to carry out the process of monitoring, measuring and evaluating the performance of your portfolio.

We would agree a review date to report to you about your investment portfolio as well as completing a further risk-profiling assessment because as when important events in your life occur such as; when you get married, start a family or reach retirement age, your personal attitude to investment may change and affect your risk profile score. We can thus adjust the asset allocation of your portfolio as necessary.

Our investment committee meets quarterly to review and assess our portfolios performance and their component funds.

Any outperformance of funds will be noted and underperforming funds will be investigated. The same measurable criteria used in the fund selection process are used to assess funds.

We will contact you to ask you to authorise any changes to funds within your portfolio if our committee feels it is necessary to change a fund due to its performance.

Portfolio valuations are available at any time by logging into your personal client site.