The best investment for you will depend on your financial objectives, how long you have to achieve them and the amount of risk you are prepared to accept. A professional financial adviser can help you clearly define your goals, establish an investment timeframe and identify your risk profile. Using this information your adviser can construct a financial plan detailing the appropriate investment strategies and investments for you.

Rather than attempting to invest directly yourself, you can access a wide range of assets by investing in managed funds. Managed funds are an easy and effective way to invest, and offer many benefits in contrast to 'do-it-yourself' strategies.

Managed funds may invest in a single asset class such as cash, fixed interest, property or shares or in a combination of them.

Cash is the generic term for highly liquid investments that are extremely safe. These include short term bank deposits and treasury notes. Cash is the least risky of the major asset classes, generally providing investors with a moderate regular income but little opportunity for capital gain.

Fixed interest investments, or bonds as they are more commonly called, are effectively loans provided by investors to corporations and government bodies in return for interest payments over the life of the bond. Bonds carry a low to medium risk and predominantly reward investors with a regular income stream generally higher than that earned by cash investments.

Property can include direct property, listed property trusts (LPTs) and other property securities. Managed funds tend to favour LPTs as they are more liquid than other property investments. LPTs invest in a range of property including residential housing, shopping centres, office buildings, factories, and hotels. As property is a growth investment capital gains may be expected over the long term in addition to income from rent. Property is considered moderately volatile.

Shares provide investors with an interest in the company issuing the stock. As a shareholder, you may enjoy the company's profits through dividends and can also sell the shares, hopefully for a capital gain sometime in the future. Shares are the most volatile of the major asset classes in the short term, but they have outperformed other asset classes over the longer term.

Through our relationship with Shaw Stockbroking we can offer a review of your existing share portfolio to ensure a diverse portfolio of stocks that meet your needs and objectives.

For larger portfolios Shaw’s ‘Your Portfolio’ service offers daily monitoring of your portfolio and a comprehensive quarterly and end of year reporting service. Your portfolio is tailored to suit your exact needs, based on your risks and objectives, which may be income, balanced or growth orientated.  Your Portfolio helps you manage your overall asset allocation by considering any existing stock holdings to ensure diversification. Typically, this service trades infrequently as the key to success is the long-term application of a tailored stock-picking strategy.

Borrowing to invest (or gearing as it is commonly called) can boost the value of your investment portfolio over time. Using a margin loan or your home as security you can borrow funds to invest in additional growth assets. This process can help increase your wealth while you receive attractive tax deductions for the interest paid on the loan.

Investors should be aware that gearing is not without risks. While gearing can magnify returns when investment values increase, it can also magnify losses when investment values fall. For this reason it is important that only quality growth investments are selected for a geared portfolio.

You’ve carefully weighed in your own mind how you want your investment portfolio to look: just the right amount of your assets allocated to stocks versus fixed-income investments. You feel comfortable with the growth/income and risk profile of your investment portfolio, and you have carefully diversified your assets over all the investment categories, and even within each category. Then, inevitably, the market jumps up or down, and your investment portfolio is thrown completely off balance. How much variation should you tolerate before you need to take action to rebalance your asset allocation?

Your investment portfolio is a balancing act. That’s why our advice is tailored to suit your personal investment goals. Our portfolio management Services are designed for discerning clients who require specialist investment advice, but prefer not to be involved in the day-to-day administration of their stock market portfolios. We take care of all the paperwork and administration associated with your portfolio, so you have more time to enjoy the things which are really important to you.

Our job is to properly allocate your assets in order to reduce market risk while still outperforming the market.

Wealth creation means the strategies you put in place to create a better financial situation for yourself in the future these can include superannuation, investment, property ownership and numerous other ways to achieve your end goals, including making sure you have an appropriate level of insurance.

The key to successful wealth creation is to set clearly defined and realistic goals and to then design a plan that will help you to achieve those goals.  The right investment strategies can help you to create wealth faster. There are alternative strategies available to accumulate wealth including regular savings, tax minimisation, negative gearing, superannuation, and salary packaging, to name a few. Our Financial Planners will assess your financial circumstances and develop a strategy to suit you.

While it is important to monitor risk, it is also important for successful wealth creation to take advantage of opportunities through continuous research and assertive investment behaviour. We can help you design a tax effective plan and an asset allocation strategy (i.e. the proportion of shares, property, bonds and cash) that is tailored to your individual circumstances. This will take into account the length of time you will be investing and your willingness to accept volatility in your investments.

Should you need to accelerate your wealth accumulation plan, we can show you how to use a gearing (or "borrowing to invest") strategy that does not add to your investment risk unnecessarily.