There is no one in the world who can truthfully profess to having the perfect investment strategy. Every day we tune into Bloomberg and see numerous industry “professionals” completely disagree about the same topics. However, there are some people who have it more right than others and Warren Buffet is near the top of that list.

Buffet recently described how $40 invested in Coca Cola in 1919 would now be worth $11,000,000. This is obviously an incredible statistic with the added benefit of nearly one hundred years of hindsight, but what Buffet is teaching us is that patience is the key to investing. No one could have predicted the global dominance that Coca Cola would build over last century. Fewer still would have weathered the Great Depression, a World War or even the market peaks where it looked like a good time to sell. The point Buffet is making is that it is dangerous to try and time the markets and worst still to let your emotions guide investment decisions. The example shows us that with a good company you can figure out what is going to happen, not when it is going to happen.

One hundred years is a long time to achieve a return, so let’s reduce this to the past fifteen years. Here are three well known companies of the 21st century:

• Monster Energy – manufacturer of energy soft drinks
• Deckers Outdoor Corp – owner of the Ugg boot brand
• Gilead Sciences – a pharmaceutical company that has produced revolutionary drugs for HIV and Hepatitis-C

For a start it is easy to pick winners when we look backwards. In reality who could have predicted that the world would take to consuming huge quantities of caffeine laden sports drinks whilst wearing sheepskin boots? Even if we could predict the right industry, how would we then know which company in that industry to buy? There are many pharmaceutical companies that would have lost all of your investment over 15 years chasing the same dream as Gilead.

What this example really highlights is the risk that comes with picking individual stocks. Yes, the rewards can be significant, but so can the losses. In this regard it is no different to gambling your hard earned savings on the Roulette table. For this reason we do not pick individual stocks for ourselves or our clients. Instead, we use actively managed investment funds that are broadly diversified geographically and among asset classes. The key words hear are actively managed and they are often misunderstood by investors.

Our investment managers are selecting those companies they believe could be the next Coca Cola or Monster Energy. Do they always get it correct, of course not, but they are spreading that risk across hundreds of different companies. Furthermore, each of our clients portfolios will typically hold 5-10 different investment funds, this means they hold positions in hundreds and hundreds of companies. The overall effect is an enormous reduction in risk and a higher chance of consistent returns over the long-term. But, not all investment managers are created equal, as with anything there are good and bad ones.

We monitor tens of thousands of investment fund managers around the world and when judging them we use a very strict set of criteria. Two of the most important factors we consider are:

Longevity

The most important factor when judging a managers performance is to look at how long and how consistently they have delivered their returns. Looking at a track record over a short timeframe tells us nothing. To demonstrate this point consider the Franklin UK Smaller Companies fund (ISIN: GB00B3VGKJ64). This fund has delivered average annual returns of 26.07% over the past three years putting it in the top 10% of all UK Small-Cap Equity funds. However, over ten years its performance is so poor it is in the bottom 10% of all UK Small-Cap Equity funds. Investing should never be about short-term gains so the second statistic is the important one.

Capital Preservation

Volatility erodes investment performance; an investment manager must be able to manage risk and preserve the capital that they manage. In our earlier example, Deckers Outdoor Corp provided an average annual return of 24.26% over ten years. But its deviation above and below this average is over 50%. We cannot tolerate this kind of fluctuation and we would not expect our investors to either.

There is a lot written about how investors should buy indexes instead of actively managed funds. This is an unwise investment strategy for a number of reasons. The first, is that many indexes are very poorly diversified, for instance the Dow Jones contains only thirty companies. More important than their diversification, however, is their performance. To illustrate this look at the returns of two of the world’s major indexes:

• FTSE100 in the UK – 10 year average annual return 2.46%
• S&P500 in the USA – 10 year average annual return 5.65%

Investing should not be exciting or sexy, it should be consistent and reliable. When we plan our futures we need to be able to make reasonable assumptions about how our assets will perform. This cannot be achieved if we are constantly on the hunt for the next Ugg boot because who knows how much money we’ll lose trying to find it.

A well managed portfolio, spread across a range of high quality investment fund managers, will deliver the returns and capital preservation that you need to achieve any financial goal within a reasonable timeframe.