Investment Advice
Combining the best of your knowledge with the best of our experience
One of the focus areas that Mark Freeman & Associates specialises in, is providing guidance on how not-for-profit organisations can manage their investments effectively, ensuring that investment capital works hard enough to achieve the results they need.
Currently we oversee assets in excess of $250 million world wide. Our experience includes the development and management of a £500 million investment trust fund, ensuring that the investment managers delivered the required capital growth and income required to meet the trust’s grant programme.
Between 2007 and 2010 Mark Freeman worked with The Cadbury Trust developing their investment strategy and policy. He worked with trustees to select the appropriate investment managers, and monitored their performance in line with the trust’s objectives, whilst also ensuring there were funds available in both the challenging and the good economic times.
More recently we continue to work with an organisation that has extensive ethical restrictions. It has benefited from our approach to realise above inflation gains on its investment portfolio, whilst at the same time reducing the volatility to ensure that the gains are delivered with a smooth, steady approach.
A robust and well thought-through investment strategy is increasingly critical to the success of not-for-profit organisations. Creating an investment strategy requires access to objective and unbiased advice, a wide and deep experience of the charitable and allied sectors, and a supportive advocate to deliver only what is best for each organisation.
We can assist in a number of ways:
Investment Objective Setting - where there is a need to work with you to document the objectives in your investment. Our approach to understanding your strategic requirements is to first identify what you and your organisation are looking to achieve in the future, and examine some of the more immediate strategic issues. Working in partnership with you we aim to address your strategic goals, as well as some you might not have considered. A significant part of this process may be the need to consider ethical constraints.
Investment Review – our investment review process examines:
- whether the investment managers understand your requirements
- whether they are meeting your objectives
- their approach to investment implementation and management
- how they manage volatility and
- we also look at peer performance. We perform various types of analysis of their performance, some more complex and some straightforward analysis, all of which is presented to you in graphical format for ease of interpretation.
Investment Tendering – we identify suitable investment houses appropriate to your objectives. Usually this includes a choice of investment managers with different styles so that you can determine which works best for your organisation.
Investment Implementation – we deal with all the paperwork (the Investment Management Agreement, changes to mandates and transfer of assets etc) to effect a seamless move from where you currently have your investments to the new managers. We also seek legal advice concerning the risks associated with the agreement and structure of the investments.
Investment Monitoring – we can provide ongoing monitoring of your investments and investment managers, working closely with you to ensure that the investment managers achieve your objectives through regular meetings and performance reports. We arrange review meetings with your organisation, ourselves and the investment managers so that you develop an ongoing relationship with them. This ensures that they continue to learn about your organisation’s needs and that your objectives are achieved.
We focus at all times on building a close working relationship and sharing our specialist knowledge in a clear and user-friendly way so that you are empowered to make your own informed choices and decisions both now and in the future.