By JOHN SPIERS 21/10/2009
It has now been one year since I returned to Bestinvest as CEO and I’ve been looking back at what we have achieved over that period. It's fair to say that morale was pretty low in autumn 2008. Markets were falling off a cliff and we’d suffered from a batch of staff defections.
This was a very testing time because some of the pillars of professional investing were challenged. Diversification across multiple asset classes was supposed to help protect portfolios from extreme volatility but in 2008 every asset except for Government bonds and cash was hammered. When liquidity is withdrawn most assets become correlated because investors are seeking to raise cash from any available source. We are now seeing the reverse of that as the massive liquidity created by central banks spills over into tangible assets.
What have we been doing to adapt to the new environment?
Well the most important thing is that we’ve been investing in our people and systems with the result that we now have the largest and most experienced team of professionals in our history. Our investment process has continued to be refined and that’s been reflected in the strong performance of our Multi Asset Portfolio (MAP) funds.
We’re proud that we remain totally independent. Conflicts of interest are the root cause of most of the past problems in financial services and that’s why we’ve designed our charging basis and our fund selection criteria so that we align our interests with our clients. We question how an adviser can claim to be independent when in-house funds represent over 30% of the total.
We live in exciting times and we have a host of developments underway that will further enhance our client proposition in the future. Giving the best advice to our clients will always remain our main objective.