True lifelong financial planning for the serious business of life.

True lifelong financial planning
for the serious business of life.

Category: Thought pieces

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Father and son with their arms round each other in black and white

Is this the death of inheritance tax as we know it?

Recently an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Intergenerational Fairness (APPG IIF) published a report which recommends the abolition of Inheritance Tax in its current form. Here, we look at main reasons leading to the publication of this report and take a look at the recommended changes to this deeply unpopular tax. Inheritance Tax (IHT) is a […]

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Category: Financial Planning, Thought pieces

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Stock market & economic commentary……the January effect and more

We make no apology for referring to this stock market trend again this year, but the circa 1% rise in the UK Footsie 100 Index on the first trading day of 2020 is potentially a very good sign for Investors. A study of the Index over the past twenty years found that in 17 of […]

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Category: Business, Thought pieces

Man writing in notepad

Venture capital trusts for high earners

A Venture Capital Trust is a tax efficient, closed-end collective investment scheme which offers retail investors access to small unquoted, growth companies with generous tax reliefs to compensate for the higher risks involved. VCTs are listed on the London Stock Exchange. To compensate for the higher risk and illiquid nature of investing in VCTs, they […]

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Category: Business, Thought pieces

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M&G Property Portfolio Fund

Early last month the £2.5 billion M&G Property Portfolio Fund was forced to stop investors from taking cash withdrawals from the fund. This is an open-ended fund where sales of units by investors can result in the manager being forced to sell some investments to realise cash to meet those redemptions. The fund had seen […]

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Category: Business, Thought pieces

2019 Market & Economic Commentary — And a look ahead

Stock markets don’t care about what is happening today. They are a forward-looking discounting machine and are more concerned about the future. This can create a disconnect between prevailing news headlines and stock market performance. The last 12 months have been a case in point when it was easy to find lots of things to […]

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Category: Business, Thought pieces

Stock market graph decreasing

Property and its importance to the global economy

It is now more than ten years since the global financial crisis, a key trigger of which was a downturn in the US property market. Indeed, property has been associated with financial crises and recessions many times throughout history. Why then does the property market have the potential to have such an important bearing on […]

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Category: Business, Thought pieces

Investment Styles — Growth Versus Value

Nothing goes on forever in financial markets. For all the noise and industry fashions; whether it’s the importance of geographical weightings, economic statistics or portfolio risk measurement driven by index construction, they all come and go, reverting to the mean and overshooting in the other direction. The one thing an investor can rely on is […]

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Category: Business, Thought pieces

Government bonds, negative interest rates and the value of diversification

Bond investors are living in a topsy turvy world.  The global financial crisis presented central banks with unprecedented challenges which were met with extraordinary actions. A decade on, we can now see that these measures saved the global economy from deflation and economic depression. However, the unintended consequence of these extraordinary measures was that they […]

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Category: Business, Thought pieces

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Preparing to live longer

“Old Age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you have to start young”. These words of wisdom from former US President Theodore Roosevelt may resonate with many of us as we face retirement—especially as that timeframe is getting longer.  When the first UK state pension came into effect in January 1909, […]

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Category: Business, Financial Planning, Investment management, Thought pieces

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