Our mission is to make financial advice accessible and affordable to everyone. As part of our commitment to accessibility, we strive to make investing with us transparent and easy to understand, so we’ve made some changes to our portfolio factsheets. Here’s everything you need to know.
Rebalancing our portfolios
Last year we rebalanced our investment portfolios. This means that we changed where and how we invest, and as a result, the type of investments in your portfolio have changed. We also reassessed the global markets that we invest in, and our portfolios now have a higher proportion of assets invested in North American markets than the UK.
These changes were made as part of our long-term investment strategy rather than tactical, which is where investors try and predict market movements in the short term. With these changes we decided to update the way that we display the performance of your assets to show you the actual past performance, rather than simulated past performance.
What’s the difference? We hear you ask!
Simulated past performance:
Simulated past performance does not show the actual performance of a portfolio under our management. It is used to give you an idea of what kind of investments are in the portfolio and how they have previously performed.
Actual past performance:
This information accurately shows you how our portfolios have performed during their time under our management.
This move to actual past performance will show how your portfolios have actually performed, taking into account the changes we have made to the portfolios. You can find the latest performance information in your factsheets, which are in the documents section of your investment portal.
Setting new benchmarks
A benchmark is a point of comparison that we use to assess how well your portfolio has performed.
The new benchmark that we’re using is inflation. Inflation is how we measure the ‘buying power’ of your money - how much bang you get for your buck. This is why it’s important that investments grow in line with inflation (at least!), so that your money maintains its buying power.
We’re changing the benchmark of your investments because we want to show you their performance in the most transparent way possible. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the investment industry and measuring investment performance against inflation shows you more accurately whether you’re making money on your investments or not.
The measure of inflation which we will be using is the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI is calculated by tracking the price of 650 items, which represent goods and services bought by the ‘average’ UK household.
What we want to do is give you an understanding of how your money is performing in real terms and show how much it would be worth if you could spend it right now. We hope that the changes we have made make investing with us clearer. If you have any questions about these changes please contact us.
With any investment your capital is at risk, investments can go down as well as up.
