The Integra Financial Services advice team invest the necessary time and effort into helping you clarify your goals and aspirations. This understanding allows us to provide advice that is tailored to helping you achieve these goals and objectives. A key component of this advice is investment planning and as such Integra Financial Services have designed a clear approach based on our investment philosophy.
Our approach to investment planning is underpinned by a number of key beliefs that form the basis of the Integra Investment Philosophy. We use these to establish and review our client’s portfolios.
Markets
Markets Work
Markets throughout the world have a history of rewarding investors for the capital they supply. Companies compete for investment capital, and millions of investors compete to find the most attractive returns. Markets quickly incorporate information from this competition into security prices.
“More money has been lost trying to anticipate and protect from corrections than actually in them.”
~ Peter Lynch
Structure
Structure Determines Performance
Decades of financial research have identified dimensions of higher expected returns in the global capital markets. Portfolio can be structured around these dimensions, which are sensible, backed by data, and cost-effective to pursue in diversified portfolios.
“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.”
~ Sir William Bragg
Diversify
Diversification Is Essential
Diversification is an essential tool available to investors. It enables them to capture broad market forces while reducing the uncompensated risk associated with individual securities and increasing flexibility in trading.
“Everything in life, individually or socially, is a trade-off. We determine the risk levels we’re willing to tolerate.”
~ Robert Merton
Invest
Invest, Do Not Speculate
Traditional investment approaches strive to beat the market by taking advantage of perceived pricing “mistakes” and attempting to predict the future. Too often, these approaches prove costly and futile. Predictions go awry and managers may hold the wrong securities at the wrong time, missing the strong returns that markets can provide. Meanwhile, capital-based economies thrive – not because markets fail but because they succeed.
“Most of the time common stocks are subject to irrational and excessive price fluctuations in both directions as the consequence of the ingrained tendency of most people to speculate or gamble…to give way to hope, fear and greed.”
~ Benjamin Graham
Awareness
Investment Awareness
An awareness of where you are invested and the risks associated provides a far greater sense of comfort throughout the investment market cycles. Being able to sleep at night is one of the most important factors when it comes to investing.
“You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.”
~ Peter Lynch
Focus
Focus On Your Plan
An investment plan based on the science of investing and personal investment needs frees you to focus on what matters. Let markets work for you by taking advantage of sensible, well-diversified, cost-effective portfolios and practical experience. As your Financial Adviser, we can help create an investment plan that fits into your overall financial plan.
“Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.”
~ Paul Samuelson
IMPLEMENTING OUR INVESTMENT PHILOSOPHY
To implement our investment philosophy, Integra Financial Services has created a series of centrally researched and maintained portfolios. Each portfolio has a strategic asset allocation and is designed to give access to a well diversified investment solution with good risk control and a well balanced mix of assets and securities.
They are created and reviewed by our Investment Committee ensuring that we leverage the broad experience and knowledge across the company. This Investment Committee meets on a regular basis to monitor the overall portfolios and the managers within them and to consider other investment opportunities for inclusion in portfolios going forward.
This approach allows us to take a structured, disciplined and consistent approach to building client portfolios and to maximise in-house and external experience and knowledge for the benefit of all our clients.