Funds Focus

In times of falling markets, even the most hardened investment professional can panic and overlook the simplest solution.

I recently found myself watching a feature on Bloomberg covering investor strategies in a falling market. A panel of experts were sitting around a table discussing what investors could do to protect their portfolio or possibly benefit from falling share markets. Their discussion centred on bonds, as the debt markets tend to rise when equities fall; gold, as the ultimate

Having managed a team of planners for a number of years, one of the common mistakes I have seen with both advisers and retirees is the assumption that a 12%pa average return in equities is better than a fixed return of 7%pa from cash.

For the most part, that’s not a bad assumption to make as we know that sharemarket returns are typically volatile but tend to outperform cash over the longer term.

As financial planners we are taught to expect that clients in retirement should take less risk

There are some that believe that investors can make money if the market is rising and money if the market is falling, but not in a volatile sideways market. We beg to differ…

Product providers are always developing new products for the market conditions we seem to be facing and Alpha Structured Investments’ Results Series and the UBS Perles & Goals Series are prime examples of investments suited to the volatile and sideways moving markets we have been experiencing this last year.