Investment portfolios

How your wealth is invested is one of the key factors as to whether your financial plan will be successful. For your plan to be as healthy and resilient as possible, we will be aiming for your wealth to grow steadily, without you needing to take excessive risk.

We can recommend portfolios of investment funds from the whole marketplace. For wealth held in your active workplace pension, for example, we will be able to assess the selection of funds available and make our recommendation from there. For most, it is usually sensible to invest through a ‘platform’, which is a technology service that allows access to thousands of investment funds from the whole marketplace, including the successful Balance Wealth Investment Portfolios.

The Balance Wealth Portfolios

We manage two ranges of successful in-house portfolios, which are exclusively available to clients of Balance: Wealth Planning. Here are the key things you need to know:

  1. Both have consistently strong performance, in line with market benchmarks.
  2. They are both very low cost and well diversified, which minimises volatility and protects your investment growth.
  3. We offer a responsible investment option to support your personal values.
  4. Each portfolio range comes in 10 risk levels to suit your needs.

In our Core portfolio, the focus is on investing for good returns, while keeping things simple and low cost.

In our Good Practice portfolio, the funds are tilted towards companies demonstrating good practice, using responsible investing criteria. Companies are measured in several ways, including how they manage three key issues:

  • Environmental sustainability
  • Social responsibility
  • Good business governance

We have a dedicated investment website with more information about our portfolio ranges, the investment returns and volatility.

Balance Wealth Investment Philosophy

We believe wealth management and financial planning go together hand in hand in helping our clients successfully achieve their objectives. Having a range of investment portfolios founded on the core principles of our investment philosophy is central to this.

We know that we cannot control the returns that investors receive, but we can control other factors that make a real difference to their long term objectives. This includes everything from minimising investment costs, and having a well diversified portfolio, to managing the emotional reactions to investment movements, or setting budgets.

An investment philosophy is a set of principles that guides and steers our investment decisions. It allows us to acknowledge the breadth of complex options, the weight of evidence supporting them, and to simplify that down to key points.

These are our key principles:

  • We make decisions that are backed by academic evidence.
  • We invest globally, using very well diversified funds.
  • We choose funds that are simple, low cost and do what they say they will.
  • We choose funds that track market benchmarks closely.
  • We employ a strategic asset allocation approach with infrequent changes.
  • We do not work by intuition, or respond to short term news or opinion.
  • We do not create a short term focus in specific sectors or geographical areas.
  • We do not use complex types of investment fund (derivatives, hedge funds).
  • We do not choose funds based on recent outperformance.
  • We do not employ tactical asset allocation with frequent changes.

Click here to read our full Investment Philosophy on our dedicated investment website.