- Watermark Financial Solutions Ltd.

Not all Financial Advisers are ‘Independent’ and as such they cannot offer solutions to your needs from the entire market, which means that you, the client, are disadvantaged.  Furthermore, very few ‘independent’ firms are authorised by the Financial Services Authority to manage client money on a ‘discretionary’ basis.

At Watermark we are both ‘Independent’ and ‘Discretionary Investment Managers’ which means that we can recommend products from the whole market and then deliver close active management of your money.

Discretionary Managed Portfolio Service (DMPS)

We have a range of portfolios that cater for all types of risk appetite and whether you are investing for income and/or growth.

The beauty of our DMPS is that we offer it across all product and tax wrappers including ISAs, Unit Trust/OEIC Portfolios, Onshore & Offshore Bonds, Personal Pensions, Self Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs) and Small Self Administered Schemes (SSASs).

We do not know of any other firm in the UK that can offer this service, but we are happy to be corrected!

Assessing your Investment Risk Appetite

We use a sophisticated risk assessment process devised by Watson Wyatt, one of the UK’s best known risk strategist companies.
The process requires you to complete an Attitude Toward Investment Risk Questionnaire, which is effectively a psychometric test which provides a risk profile for you.  From the results we can decide on the most appropriate portfolio for your money to be invested in.  It is important to be aware that we can move you, without charges or costs, between portfolios if your risk profile changes.
 

Our main Managed Growth Portfolios have the following titles, which are self explanatory:
 

Very Cautious, Cautious, Balanced, Adventurous and Speculative.  We will provide more complete descriptions for you and discuss your requirements in more details.
 

We have carried out risk analysis of our portfolios and various ‘what if’ scenarios, which are also available.
 

Strategic Asset Allocation & Risk Management

Each portfolio is compiled with different assets ranging from Cash, Gold, Government and Corporate Bonds to Shares/Equities, Commodities and Alternatives.

Because these assets are not correlated in the way they perform i.e. when the stock markets are falling sharply, gold and government bonds can rise and cash remains constant, we aim to provide more predictable and sustainable investment returns.

Each portfolio has a long term strategic asset allocation which is the average expected weighting of assets in the portfolio over time.  For example, we would expect the long term average weighting of equities and commodities (higher risk assets) in our Cautious Managed Portfolio to be around 40%.

Dynamic or Tactical Asset Allocation and Dual-Layer Investment Management (D-LIM)

Our ‘Dual-Layer Investment Management’ (D-LIM) combined with Dynamic/Tactical Asset Allocation strategies provided through our authorisation as Discretionary Investment Managers , ensures that our client money is managed on a macro and micro basis with the objective of optimising performance and generating more predictable and sustainable investment returns for our clients.

Effectively, within each asset class we contract out the buying of individual securities to some of the world’s best known financial institutions such as Invesco Perpetual, Fidelity, Newton, Henderson, Jupiter and JP Morgan.  The full list substantial and the range of funds is vast.

So the individual fund managers run their segment of your portfolio and we overlay our management expertise on top in two ways:

1.  Dynamic/Tactical Asset Allocation - we move away from the long term Strategic Asset Allocation regularly because we do not want our clients participating in substantial stock & commodity market falls at volatile times, yet we want the growth from the these markets in the good times.  As we see fit, we are able to increase or decrease the weighting or exposure to any of the underlying assets within your portfolio.  As discretionary Investment Managers, we are able to do this without first seeking your approval, which enables us to act very quickly rather than being bogged down with the admin involved in contacting hundreds of clients for their approval.

2.  Individual Fund Manager Substitutions - We also monitor the performance of individual fund mangers against their peers and if a manager fails to deliver to our expectations we will substitute him.

Furthermore, sometimes a highly rated fund manager will leave a company and the fund will be managed by a new person moving forward.  Also, funds can become suspended if they are dealing in illiquid assets.  These are further reasons for ensuring that the funds are monitored and substitutions made when necessary.

The value of investments can go down as well as up and past performance is no indication to future performance.