Making your own investments – from choosing your savings account to which property to buy – is a matter of personal choice. Despite this, professionals in the field of investment can add a great deal of value to your portfolio of investments. Think of a pension plan, for example, that you may pay into via your employer every month from deductions made from your salary. The pension plan will have a number of different investment funds that make up the growth of the plan. These will usually include some funds which are managed by professionals and some which are not, so-called passive investments that usually track a particular market sector or the Bank of England interest rate.
If you are looking to liquefy an asset and turn it into a new investment opportunity, then you may have considered ploughing it into bricks and mortar in terms of a new property. Equally, you may have thought of buying into a commodity such as gold. Each of these investment options has an attendant risk that is associated with it. A portfolio of investments, made through a professionally managed fund, evens out the risks to give you a much better spread of risk. Professional funds, like those managed by AnaCap, will capture the latest market trends across a diverse range of asset classes, buying into stock that is rising, in order to offer you the best potential return for your outlay. AnaCap fund managers – and others in the financial services sector – scour the market for latest developments from companies and take a view of which ones will attract the most attention from investors. They also often move early so that, when your money is invested, you get the most bang for your buck.
Many people look for professional management of their investments because they don’t have confidence about investing by themselves. Although there is an increasing number of ways that amateurs can invest for themselves, knowledge of the fast-moving markets remains key – and that is what a fund manager gives you. Indeed, lots of people really value the human connection they get from someone who is managing their fund. After all, it is the human connection that is at the heart of the trust that is needed to commit to any form of investment scheme.
In the most part, investors tend to be satisfied with competitive performance with their returns. This means that they do not necessarily expect their fund manager to bring about consistently market-beating returns. Good professional fund managers should be able to prove their ability to outperform the market on a consistent basis. Savvy investors select a professional investment management company that can add value by delivering competitive returns, but doing so at carefully prescribed levels of risk. Unlike amateurs, who can get carried away by so-called bubble investments, professionals play for the longer term return and, by bringing self-discipline and rationality into play, help to avoid investment mistakes, such as following the herd instinct that all too often means hunting around after yesterday’s trends, rather than the next big thing.