Investment Advice Colchester, Essex

As independent financial advisers, we provide quality, fee based investment advice with a range of services designed to keep you up to date with your plans.

We specialise in providing investment advice and work closely with clients to put together investment portfolios that manage the risks you take, but also create decent long-term growth or income.

What's more, clients who receive investment advice from us get the opportunity to receive the portfolio management service. This report gives you a detailed review of your investments, and allows us to recommend any changes to your plans.

Our investment advice process

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Step 1 - Factfinding and establishing objectives
This is one of the most important aspects of giving investment advice. We would usually hold an initial meeting, where we would ask detailed questions about your financial situation. This would involve the discussion of your objectives, expectations and attitude to risk.

We would need to examine in detail questions of affordability and liquidity of assets, so that we can be sure of giving you appropriate investment advice.

Finally, we would look at your tax situation to ensure that what we recommend does not have an adverse effect on your other affairs.

This meeting is without obligation, and we only charge for our time if you take up our services.

Step 2 - Paperwork
Obviously, there is paperwork to be completed with any financial transaction, to ensure that both sides understand their duties and responsibilities.

At this point, we would estimate the work involved to research your investments, and ask you to sign your agreement to this. We have the advantage of being fee-based, so we get paid for giving you investment advice, not for selling you products. This means that you can be secure in the knowledge that we will recommend what is right for you, not what pays the most commission.

We also ask you to sign a Letter of Authority to enable us to gather any technical data we need on your existing products. This is to satisfy the provisions of the Data Protection Act.

Step 3 - Establishing risk
We ask you to complete a short questionnaire on investment risks. This is a vital area as there are many types of investment funds available to you. Our philosophy is to educate you on the risks (and rewards) posed by these investments, and to ensure that your money is invested in a portfolio which is suited to your attitude towards risk. This diversification helps to smooth out any volatility.

For example, it is often common for older clients to want to take less risk with their money. This is understandable given that they have worked hard to earn this money, and do not want to lose it, especially when they have less time to make up any losses.

Once we have the results of your questionnaire, we can then rank your risk tolerance on a scale. This then gives us the opportunity to create an ideal portfolio based on the amount invested, and the time you have to invest. Effectively, this is the portfolio which gives you the best chance for returns with the lowest volatility appropriate to you. Of course, nothing in investing is guaranteed.

What tends to happen is for lower risk investors to have more of lower risk funds, such as cash, corporate bonds, and gilts. More riskier investors would have more exposure to shares, both in the UK, and abroad and to other investments such as property. Those in the middle would get some of everything to balance the risk. Obviously, we recommend investment advice to help you to achieve the correct balance in this area.

We would then discuss this with you and explain what each sector entails, to establish whether this fits in with your expectations.

Step 4 - Selecting the generic product(s)
Products, such as ISAs, unit trusts, OEICs and pensions are simply wrappers, each of which have consequences to your tax situation as well as other effects on your goals. Within these wrappers, we can usually select investments which are as ‘risky’ or ‘safe’ as you require.

We use sophisticated research tools to establish which product is right for you, taking into account factors such as charges, the flexibility of the product, the strength of the company, the administration, and of course our generic knowledge.

Step 5 - Creating a portfolio
This is one of the most important steps to any investment advice. We would then examine all the funds available to you, in each of the sectors recommended in Step 3. We can examine every fund on the market (choosing from thousands in each type of investment).

We use another sophisticated tool to examine the relative past performance of the funds, as well as external factors such as the ratings of the funds provided to us by Lipper, a leading company dedicated to fund research. This allows us to give a view on how well your portfolio has done in the past, plus the likelihood of it doing well in the future.

Step 6 - Producing a client report
We summarise all this data into a report, so that you can take the time to examine our investment advice. We give you an overview of the process so that you can easily see how we have come to a decision. We also give full details of the raw data, so you can go over the research yourself. We would also supply important data such as quotations, giving charges, and brochures and key facts documents.

Once we have discussed this with you (usually in a further meeting), we can arrange for you to sign all the relevant documents to put the plan into force.

Step 7 - Portfolio management
it is important to regularly review your portfolio, to ensure that it does not come out of step with your expectations.

To this end, we can produce a regular report going through many of the steps outlined above). This report gives data such as a valuation, analysis of performance, an examinations of funds against their peers, and recommendations for any changes. We strongly recommend this service, as it is the best way to ensure continued long-term growth.

Want to know more? Click here to find other factsheets on investment advice.

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