Investec Wealth & Investment

About Investec Wealth & Investment

Our Philosophy

We firmly believe in offering a bespoke portfolio for each client. Whether you are aiming to grow your investments or generate income, your investment manager (not a relationship manager) will work with you to create a tailored portfolio, which can be overlaid with your ethical policy if required.

We expect to advise our charity clients on the optimum asset allocation structure to meet their capital return and income requirements, taking into account both their capacity for and attitude to investment risk. Formulating your investment strategy is not a one off: we work with our clients to ensure its continuing suitability.

Assets are managed on an active basis whereby portfolios are adapted to reflect the market environment and changes in each client’s circumstances. Our guiding principle is that markets are far from perfect and that a research-based approach will both reveal these imperfections and provide the best overall results in the long term.

Our investment managers interpret, challenge and adapt the output of our in- house research to suit our client requirements. Our research department comprises strategists and asset class specialists covering all asset classes and major markets. We firmly believe that this interpretative, yet collegiate approach offers the best route to understanding the market valuation of companies since it allows us to pull together the views of the whole market, which ultimately determines the market price of shares, rather than relying on specific individual influences.

Crucially, our investment style is adaptable: our investment philosophy is not slavish to any single ‘style’ such as growth, value or momentum. Different styles will be used at different points of the economic cycle. Over many years we have found that a disciplined approach to investment incorporating all of these (sometimes conflicting) factors, coupled with a flexibility to embrace change, has given us a performance track record of which we are extremely proud.

We manage risk through the sensible use of diversification to ensure that any investment choices we make are not just suitable to your needs but also made with a liberal dose of common sense. We believe that generating incremental excess returns over time adds up to greater levels of outperformance. Making outsized returns one year is often caused by taking on too much risk; these periods are often followed by significant underperformance. This ‘boom and bust’ mentality is not our style; it is unsettling for charities and inefficient over the longer term.

We aim to invest directly where we believe we can add value, and this ensures greater flexibility and a lower cost solution. We make use of third party collectives when we believe this the most appropriate way of achieving exposure to more specialist areas.