Wealth & Money Management Awards 2018

22 2018 Wealth & Money Managaement Awards Company: Acuity Management Limited Contact: Tracy Sawyerr Tel: + 44 (0) 203 6033722 Web Address: www.acuityag.com WM180005 This innovative approach underpins every aspect of the company’s investment process, however the firm’s core focus remains on the investor and providing them with strong, risk adjusted returns. Steve explores how this is achieved. “Being an active manager, Seneca understands that is imperative that we seek to add value well in excess of the costs we charge our investors. At the same time, it is essential that this value added is achieved within a strong risk management framework. We take risk, but it must be calculated risk. Therefore, the starting point for all our funds is the strategic asset allocation. For a particular fund, this is determined by the fund’s objectives, our long-term real return expectations for each asset class, the value we expect to add from active management and the fund’s ongoing charges figure.” With the future stretched out in front of it, Seneca has many opportunities for further growth over the coming years. Steve concludes by sharing how the firm is seeking to capitalise on its current success and continue to offer its valued investors the support and services they have come to rely on. “Ultimately, our success requires us to achieve good investment performance over time and for our investors to be comfortable with how that is achieved. This means we need to be doing something different to our competitors. This will remain our focus as we look towards a bright and exciting future.” Best Multi-Asset Value Investment Firm 2018 - UK Seneca Investment Managers is a boutique firm that specialises in multi-asset investing. Steve Hunter provides us with a fascinating insight into the firm and the secrets behind its success. Company: Seneca Investment Managers Limited Contact: Steve Hunter Address: Tenth Floor, Horton House, Exchange Flags, Liverpool, L2 3YL, UK Phon : 0 151 906 2450 Website: senecaim.com Established in 2002, today Seneca has a national client base. Investors range from institutions such as pension funds and charities, through to financial advisers, discretionary private client managers and personal investors. All of these clients value the firm’s unique approach to multi-asset investing, as Steve highlights. “As multi-asset investors, at Seneca we invest in a wide range of asset classes in a wide range of geographies. To do this as a boutique we need to be very well organised. This means we must have a well- structured investment team and a clearly-defined investment style. “Our investment style revolves around our investors, and have coined the unique term ‘Multi-Asset Value Investing’ (MAVI). MAVI is about buying things cheaply, a simple and sensible philosophy that can be applied to both broad markets and asset classes as well as individual securities and funds. However, while the philosophy may be simple, the application is intricate – the truth is that if value investing was easy everyone would be doing it. In MAVI, we have created something new, building on the framework laid out by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd and others since in relation to equities investing.” The result of this innovative is an integrated value-oriented framework for making investment decisions across the multi-asset spectrum, supported by research papers written by respected academics that have identified relationships between starting valuations of markets or securities and subsequent medium-term performance. Furthermore, since return and risk are connected, it is important to note that buying things cheaply is an effective risk management tool as it helps avoid permanent loss of capital: the margin of safety principle was a core element of Graham and Dodd’s framework. Despite this, value investing works over medium not short time frames, so will not actively reduce short term volatility beyond that which is achieved as a result of investing across different asset classes, also known as diversification benefits. However, value investing is appropriate for investors who believe that important risk is about avoiding permanent loss of capital rather than short-term volatility where losses are mostly temporary (what goes down normally goes up again).