Asset Allocation: Fact and Fiction

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A cursory glance around the market for investment advice reveals an almost bewildering array of investment propositions, from firms with their own discretionary services (a major undertaking to build and run) and outsourced versions of the same thing, to advisory propositions using simple managed funds (still a significant feature of the tied sector).

Despite their differences, all of these propositions share certain common roots, principal amongst them the need to tie a client’s risk tolerance to the portfolio recommended, and to maximise long term returns consistent with that risk tolerance. Asset allocation, or rather the integration of asset allocation to risk assessment, is the key to performing this, with the leading method of so doing in the IFA sector being the asset allocation tool. It is therefore vital for advisers to understand how these tools work. At a fundamental level, asset allocation tools use a process called mean ...

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