Investment oversight
Looking after your investments involves far more than simply checking whether they've gone up or down.
When most people think about investment reviews, they naturally think about returns. Has the portfolio grown? Has it beaten its benchmark? Are the costs still competitive?
Those are all important questions, and they form part of every review I carry out.
Over the years, I've come to believe they tell only part of the story.
If I'm responsible for looking after someone's life savings, I don't believe it's enough simply to know how an investment has performed. I also want to know whether it's continuing to behave as it should.
Two investments can produce similar long-term returns while delivering a very different experience for investors. One may protect capital better during difficult markets. Another may recover much more quickly after a downturn. Some may begin to show subtle signs that their characteristics are changing, even though their headline performance still appears perfectly acceptable. Those differences matter because the journey can be as important as the destination, particularly when you're investing over many years.
I believe all three are important if I am to monitor investments properly.
That challenge becomes greater still when you consider the size of today's investment universe. Thousands of funds are measured against different benchmarks, grouped into different sectors and assessed using different rating systems. Making genuinely fair, like-for-like comparisons is far harder than it first appears, and that difficulty creates room for meaningful changes to go unnoticed.
Over time, I realised I needed a more consistent way of answering those questions. That led me to develop an evidence-based framework to help me monitor investments more consistently. I call this framework my Centralised Investment Proposition (CIP), although the name matters far less than the discipline behind it. Rather than relying on a single performance table or rating, it looks at multiple independent measures of investment behaviour and applies the same consistent methodology to every investment I monitor, comparing each one only against genuinely similar investments taking a similar level of risk.
It doesn't ask whether an investment performed well last year.
It asks whether it continues to earn its place in your portfolio.
However, investing isn't static. Markets evolve. Fund managers change. Investment styles move in and out of favour. A fund that is appropriate today may not exhibit exactly the same characteristics a year from now.
For that reason, I don't simply measure investments at a single point in time. I also monitor how they are changing.
Rather than asking only “is this investment performing well?”, I also ask “is there objective evidence that its underlying behaviour is changing?” That trend monitoring is designed primarily to identify emerging signs of deterioration before they become obvious through headline performance alone. It also picks up broader shifts in behaviour, which add context to my reviews, but any positive signals are treated more cautiously and always weighed against the wider evidence.
Why consistency matters
One of the principles that underpins my review process is consistency. Every investment is assessed using the same methodology, every quarter, regardless of recent performance or market sentiment. That consistency reduces the risk of making decisions based on headlines, short-term emotions or unconscious bias, and helps ensure that every investment is judged against the same objective standard.
Every quarter
Every quarter, I work through every investment held within client portfolios using the latest available data. Every investment is reviewed in exactly the same way, whether it has recently performed well or poorly. For every investment, I ask the same questions:
Those questions are asked consistently every quarter, using the same evidence-based process.
More often than not, the answer is reassuring: nothing meaningful has changed and remaining invested continues to be the right decision.
Occasionally, however, the evidence points towards a trend that deserves closer attention. When that happens, I investigate further before deciding whether any action is appropriate. I'll consider whether the change reflects normal market conditions or something more persistent, whether the investment still fulfils the role it was selected to perform, and whether making a change would genuinely improve the long-term outcome for my clients.
The evidence starts the conversation.
It never finishes it.
That distinction is important because good investment decisions rarely come from a single piece of evidence. They come from weighing the evidence carefully, in the context of your individual circumstances.
Every recommendation I make remains grounded in professional judgement and will always reflect your objectives, attitude to risk, capacity for loss, tax position and wider financial circumstances.
Investment management is often portrayed as trying to predict what markets will do next. I don't believe that's possible with any consistency.
Instead, I believe my responsibility is to ensure that every investment continues to justify its place in your portfolio. That means monitoring consistently. Questioning objectively. Investigating thoroughly. And making changes only when the evidence supports doing so.
Technology helps me ask better questions.
Experience and judgement provide the answers.
That's how I believe your investments should be looked after.