Investment strategy
The ultimate goal when investing money is the risk-controlled and careful management of your portfolio. The foundation of our investment process is a solid investment strategy tailored to your needs. We make active structural decisions for you as part of our continuous risk management. These decisions are implemented with a steady hand and a long-term perspective. Active trading based on short-term forecasts is useless and only causes unnecessary costs, which directly affects your performance and thus our investment performance. Furthermore, we are convinced that our implementation through direct investments ensures cost efficiency, eliminates conflicts of interest and maximizes transparency. Below you can find our investment process.
Why is an investment strategy important?
On the one hand, there are phases of euphoria on the markets, on the other hand, there are phases of panic. Neither of these should affect your long-term portfolio management. Anyone who becomes greedy in euphoric market phases will realize, at the latest during the next market correction, that too high risks have been taken in the investment. This leads to panic selling of securities, so that you firstly realize losses and secondly miss the sooner or later coming recovery. Long-term successful portfolio management must be done with a steady hand. This requires an investment strategy that depends on your risk capacity and risk tolerance. Once it has been defined, it should be implemented with discipline in all market phases.
Why is research part of risk management?
As part of the investment process, the optimal strategy for you is firstly defined. The strategy is then implemented by means of direct investments in stocks and bonds. Both equities and bonds require constant quality monitoring. Do key financial ratios change, for example the quality of the accounts, or the management? Are takeovers or spin-offs taking place? Part of our risk management is to monitor the companies in the sense that we can react to identifiable undesirable developments. In our opinion, research for short-term price forecasts is useless.
Why does the research not serve the purpose of short-term price forecasts?
Short-term price forecasts for individual companies are useless as their accuracy is massively overestimated. The relevant information on each company is incorporated into its share price within fractions of a second. New information, such as the announcement of a lower operating profit comes as a surprise to all market participants and is therefore not predictable – otherwise it would not be news! As a result, the stock market price also reacts unpredictably – this is known as an efficient market. Those who nevertheless waste time on short-term price forecasts distract themselves from what is important: Controlling and implementing the investment strategy and monitoring the investment quality.
Our Investment strategy
1 Investment strategy
- Clarification of the subjective willingness to take risks and the objective risk capacity
- Determination of the strategic asset allocation and the reference currency
Tools
- Customized analysis
- Portfolio Analysis
- Initial interview
2 Investment environment
- Determination of the investment environment for the shares and the concrete ranking order
- Determination of the debtors to be used
Tools
- Equities: Key figures and sustainability audit, analysis of global market position
- Bonds: control of rating, balance sheet quality, earnings and payment power, price changes
- Investment committee, company visits
3 Tactical guidelines
- Equity ratio relative to strategy
- Anti-cyclical portfolio management
- Term management
- Currency Management
Tools
- Investment committee determines the basis for uniform portfolio management
- Ongoing analysis of the economic environment
4 Implementation
- Definition of the customer-specific number of titles
- Rebalancing at industry and title level
- Anti-cyclical structure while maintaining diversification
- New admission/dissolution of titles
Tools
- Recorded decisions of the investment committee
- Direct connection to information sources like Bloomberg
- Systematic management by portfolio managers and relationship managers
5 Monitoring and research
- Ongoing analysis of the individual items
- Compliance with strategy, restrictions and investment environment
- Control of the custodian bank
Tools
- Continuous primary and secondary analysis through company visits and from sources such as Bloomberg plus sustainability analysis
- Installed control mechanisms, internal risk management and controlling as well as integrated customer information system
- Direct SWIFT connection with custodian banks
6 Reporting
- Reports periodically and on request
- Customer-specific additional evaluations
- Consolidations
Tools
- Portfolio Management System
- Independent external data suppliers
- Other software solutions