How we invest

Investing across the world’s major financial markets best positions us to take advantage of opportunities for you, while helping to manage risk by the principle of diversification.

For the same reason, we invest on your behalf across different asset classes – like equities (company shares), bonds issued by companies and governments, and alternatives such as infrastructure.

This further helps with diversification and takes advantage of opportunities across a wide spectrum of investment types and sectors, which tend to react differently to the ever evolving economic and market environment.

We have a ‘no-dogma’ approach when researching and selecting investments. We believe there is a place for both actively managed investments – investment funds managed by a professional fund manager –and passive investments, which automatically track a certain financial market’s performance, like the UK or US stock market.

Our reasoning is simple: there are certain asset classes and regions where active fund managers haven’t outperformed consistently. In those cases, we believe there’s little merit in paying a premium for their funds, and instead gain exposure to those markets via more keenly priced passive funds.

In markets where we believe active fund managers have genuine potential to outperform, however, or where an actively managed strategy offers other benefits beyond performance, such as diversification, we select high-quality actively managed funds. In other words, we have a ‘blended’, and therefore suitably diversified, approach to portfolio construction.

Fundamental to our investment philosophy is a firm belief in providing you with high-quality investment advice and management at a fair and affordable price. We believe our charges compare very favourably with the cost of investing through many advice firms. Whenever possible we aim to drive down the cost of investing for you, while at the same time seeking to generate strong performance.

Many wealth management firms, for example, maintain the ‘traditional’ model of providing a nominated investment manager and a financial planner for each client. This adds significantly to your costs and yet we believe there’s very little, if any, evidence to show it results in superior performance. Shackleton has a fundamentally different and, you could even say unique, approach nationwide. By taking a single approach to investment, yet one which still provides the flexibility required to meet your individual needs, we avoid the ‘dual cost’ of having both a nominated investment manager and a financial planner.

We believe this results in investment solutions that are well diversified from a risk perspective, deliver on the opportunities offered by a broad range of asset classes and regions, and provide a highly cost-effective and tax-efficient way to plan and invest for the future.