Hawksmoor

Aminatidi

I wondered if anyone has any thoughts, experience, or money with them please?

I've seen them mentioned on a few threads around cautious management and their track record looks to speak for itself.

I expect people will have a view on fees and whether a low cost multi-asset is a more sensible/obvious option

PNL, CGT, RICA seem to come up each time this subject arises, these seem to take a slightly different "fund of funds" approach.

https://www.hawksmoorim.co.uk/how-can-we-help-you/private-investors/multi-asset-funds/

Dean000000

Excellent steak

bowlhead99

If you want to build a reasonably cautious portfolio out of lots of underlying building blocks, these guys are already doing it for you, although with a relatively small fund size of £100-150m (smaller than the ones you mentioned, and other higher risk mixed asset investment trusts like RCP). Their higher risk Global Opportunity fund at sub £20 million is too small and new to take seriously, but I assume you're looking at their two more cautious ones.

It can be seen from the annual reports that they have some decent holdings in their mix; but the concept of paying a management fee to manage and select the funds, on top of the underlying cost of those actively managed funds or investment companies, will make such "funds of fees" seem expensive to some.

My view is generally that a fund of funds can be ok if you're not equipped to do all the underlying fund selection yourself or the amounts that you would have available to commit would make it inefficient or impossible to access the underlying holdings directly, which are well diversified. However, if you had a decent amount to invest, an IFA could create you a portfolio with some tailored personalised advice and ongoing servicing for the 0.75% a year they charge as an AMC; and there are further running costs too.

You can see that the return of Vanbrugh has been very decent in the decade they've been running in the 20-60% equity sector, for what is billed as a diverse and relatively more cautious fund with margin of safety in many of the underlying holdings. However, the decade since 2009 has not been a full market cycle - it's mostly been the bounce back from a global financial crisis that had depressed the value of equities and bonds and real estate, and then saw all asset classes grow significantly in value with feverish money printing; dovish interest rate policy without aggressive fiscal policy.

So, lots of assets have gone up in value all around the world and the returns achieved in the last 10 years are probably not what will be achieved in the next 10. If a cautious mix of assets is only going to earn you 4-5% do you really want to give away 1.5-2% in fees, or would you rather build the components yourself, to the extent you can. The answer will be different for different people.

Some will say Vanguard Lifestrategy 20% or 40% is a great cheap way to get a fund with low global equities, but I don't personally subscribe to the view that a huge fixed amount of hedged bond index (however cheap) is something that a cautious portfolio needs a megaton of at the moment, and I am more interested by people who use a variety of active underlying holdings to help them meet their goals. However, at least part of that is because they are fundamentally more interesting things to look at, which might not actually translate to wonderful real world results.

if your portfolio is big enough and your experience and resources (data and personal time availability) is broad enough for selecting and monitoring those underlying holdings to be practical and not cost you as much as a percent in extra running costs, that would be preferable to using a costly FOF, even though you (or an adviser) might overlap with some of the same things that the FoF manager picks. Most don't have the resources or experience, nor enough capital to use an IFA efficiently, so they end up with expensive complex multi asset funds or simple cheap multi asset funds, and will have to check back in a decade to see whether they went the right way.

Aminatidi

Thank you, that seems a pretty fair summary and perhaps it's confirmation bias but I see it very similarly.

I have allocations to Fundsmith and LTGE so this is basically a more cautious slice of the ISA.