Cotter On Investing: Taking the bull out of the markets: practical advice and tips from an experienced investor

Judith joined Downing in October 2009. Previously she was a partner at Acuity Capital managing AIM-quoted VCT and IHT investments and a small-cap activist fund. Prior to Acuity, Judith spent nine years as a senior investment manager with Aberdeen Asset Management Growth Capital as co Fund Manager of the 5 Aberdeen VCTs, focusing on technology and media investments in both the public and private arenas. Judith is a Non Executive Director of the Quoted Companies Alliance and is an active member on Boards both in the private and public arenas.

Nick trained as a chartered accountant, qualifying in 1992. Since qualifying he has acted as a corporate broker and investment banker at Crédit Lyonnais Securities (1994 to 2000), Robert W. Baird Limited (2000 to 2004) and Noble & Company (2005 to 2008). During his career he has advised a wide variety of companies on numerous transactions, including fund raisings, acquisitions and restructurings as well as acting as finance director to an online retailer. Nick joined Allenby Capital in July 2009 and became its Chief Executive in July 2011.

Steven joined Oakley in 2017 and has more than 18 years of investment banking experience. Steven’s focus is fund raising, communications and investor relations for Oakley Capital Investments, Oakley Capital and its portfolio companies. Prior to joining Oakley, Steven was a founding partner of investment bank Liberum Capital, where he raised equity capital for hundreds of companies and advised on public market listings. He began his career in 1997 at Collins Stewart, where he held equity research and sales roles.

Holly has worked in finance since 1999. She is a financial expert, a commentator on investment markets and the founder and MD of Boring Money. She passionately believes that we can explain things better, and that investments shouldn’t just be for “The Old Boys”.

Holly is a regular media commentator and has appeared on or contributed to the BBC, The Times, The Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday. She is living proof that you can be in Set 4 for Maths when you’re 13 and still get your head around investments.

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Behind the Balance Sheet is a top training consultancy for professional equity analysts with clients including Schroders, Legal and General, Baillie Gifford, Ruffer, Pictet and many more. Founder Steve Clapham is a veteran analyst with many years of experience on the sell side and as a partner and head of research at two multi billion hedge funds. He now also runs online courses for private investors. Watch the video to learn more.

An investment strategy is what guides an investor’s decisions based on goals, risk tolerance, and future needs for capital. Some investment strategies seek rapid growth where an investor focuses on capital appreciation, or they can follow a low-risk strategy where the focus is on wealth protection.

Diversifying your portfolio is important to manage your risk. What does diversification mean? It means spreading your risk between investments with different characteristics, so that if one investment, or group of investments doesn’t perform well it doesn’t do too much damage to the overall performance of your portfolio.

For example, it is unwise for your portfolio to be invested in only one or two companies: should one of those companies fail, you could lose a very large part of your available capital, which it would be hard to recover from.

Types of Diversification

There are various ways you can diversify your portfolio. Most obviously by investing in several companies. Another consideration, however, is geographical diversification, i.e. not having all your investments linked to the economic performance of one country or region. A common failing of investors is “home country bias”, i.e. focusing your investments on companies operating in the country you live in or are most familiar with. Should that country underperform economically (or if shares in that country’s markets appear overpriced), that will damage your returns, so it makes sense to include investments that are exposed to a variety of regions in your portfolio (biasing towards those that appear to offer the best prospective returns).