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ESG Diligence: The Key To Sustainable M&A Transactions
AAB / Blog / A Referendum on your Financial Future
BLOG17th Sep 2014
The Scottish Referendum is fast approaching. Whether you are of a political persuasion or not, the key question for most people seems to be: –
‘Will I be better off in an Independent Scotland?’
Unfortunately the answer is ‘We don’t know’, hence all the political debate.
There are some financial questions that have ‘We don’t know’ as their answer, such as: –
As none of us can predict the future we can’t answer these questions.
Is there anything we can answer? Professor David Blake, Director of the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School, recently published two working papers with some interesting conclusions: –
How then can any investor decide how and where to invest their money if fund managers don’t add value?
Fortunately, there are some questions that can be answered which can significantly improve your investment outcomes: –
By paying less. Cost is the only certainty in the investment world. If it costs you more then you get less back. As Professor Blake evidenced, fund managers who charge more don’t outperform (on average).
Whilst we cannot predict which fund, sector or country will perform the best next year, there are decades of evidence showing that stock markets work, they add value over the long term, and to reduce the risk of investing in the stock market it is necessary to diversify, as widely as possible, into not just tens of different companies, or even hundreds, but into thousands, across all sectors and global markets.
There is a body of evidence showing what the ‘Risks worth taking’ are. For example smaller companies are riskier than larger companies, but the returns they give investors are proportionately higher than the increase in risk.
The Referendum, whatever the vote turns out to be, will have an impact, it’s just impossible to say exactly what the outcome will be. When it comes to investing, however, there are three things that should get your ‘vote’; diversify, keep costs low and only take risks worth taking.