The engine of your financial plan, your investment portfolio determines how soon you meet your investment objective.
Offering a full range of investment strategies for all investors from cautious through to adventurous, Three Counties manage investment portfolios for those seeking growth, income or a combination of the two.
The majority of our clients have one thing in common; they require a long term return from their pensions, savings and investments in excess of that available from cash.
We believe that investing is about doing a few simple things exceptionally well in a highly disciplined way and not letting emotions influence decisions.
The Three Counties “Core and Satellite” approach is designed to minimise costs and volatility, while providing an opportunity to outperform the broad stock market as a whole.
We apply strategic planning assistance so as to free up your time to get on with the work you enjoy.
The majority of Three Counties clients have one thing in common; they require a long term return from their pensions, savings and investments in excess of that available from cash.
Our clients invest for many reasons, entirely determined by their financial plan. They may need to save toward retirement or to maintain an income from their pension fund. They may need to save towards a determined event; school fees or a planned expenditure. Their objective ultimately may be to preserve an existing portfolio for the benefit of future generations.
We believe that our investment approach is the most effective method by which to achieve the long term returns that our clients require from their investable assets.
We believe that investing is about doing a few simple things exceptionally well in a highly disciplined way and not letting emotions influence decisions.
Through our research we understand what drives returns within investment portfolios. We therefore only include exposure to risk assets that have been proven to reward investors in the long term.
These are the foundations which underpin our investment process. Without these core assumptions we believe it is impossible to formulate a rational investment strategy.
Three Counties employs a “Core and Satellite” approach to portfolio construction. This is designed to minimise costs and volatility, while providing an opportunity to outperform the broad stock market as a whole.
The core of the portfolio consists of passive investments that track major market indices, such as the FTSE 100. Additional positions, known as satellites, are added to the portfolio in the form of actively managed investments.
For the actively managed portion, the goal is to select investments where a portfolio manager's skill provides an opportunity to earn greater returns than those generated by the passive portion of the portfolio.
The core portion of the portfolio helps to minimise costs because passive investments are almost always less expensive than their active counterparts. Because passive investments track indices, the portfolio changes only when the index changes and as indices change infrequently, transaction costs are minimized.
By allocating a portion of the portfolio to active management, the opportunity is in place for an active manager to outperform the benchmark, thus adding to the return generated by the overall portfolio and resulting in benchmark-beating returns for the portfolio as a whole.
As such, the core-satellite approach provides an opportunity to access the best of all worlds. Better-than-average performance, limited volatility and cost control all come together in a flexible package that can be designed specifically to cater to your needs.
There are three main components at work in the construction of our Three Counties Advisory Portfolios.
The Three Counties Investment Committee, members work closely with our Head of Investments and formally meet monthly to review the performance of each advisory portfolio. The current committee has over 75 years of combined financial planning and investment management experience. We benefit from access to comprehensive external investment data links from Morningstar and Ibbotson Associates.
Morningstar is a leading provider of independent global investment research providing data on approximately 500,000 investment offerings, including stocks, investment funds, and similar vehicles, along with real-time global market data on more than 5 million equities, indexes, futures, options, commodities, and precious metals, in addition to foreign exchange and Treasury markets within 26 countries.
Ibbotson Associates is a leading authority on asset allocation with expertise in capital market expectations and portfolio implementation. Approaching portfolio construction from the top-down through a research-based investment process, its experienced consultants and portfolio managers serve, wealth managers, mutual fund firms, banks, broker-dealers, and insurance companies worldwide.
They are our vital “partners” in helping us achieve our objective that the most appropriate portfolio is one designed to maximise the probability of meeting a particular client’s financial goals. By involving this outside expertise we can utilise asset allocation models built upon decades of asset allocation research, using capital market assumptions as a foundation. Our own industry standing gives us access to regular face to face meetings with investment managers, to further help us identify what we believe to be the high-quality funds that best reflect our clients’ investment needs.
