Unlike other investment research people, we only conduct research on multi asset investments – and we were the first UK business dedicated to doing just this. This means that since our launch in 2009, we’ve been able to hone our expertise and the way we carry out our research to become specialists in this field.
Right from the beginning all our research has been based around identifying investment outcomes, calibrating risk, and categorising multi asset investments accordingly. To date, we’ve identified more than 30 different combinations of our unique investment outcome categories being used by multi asset managers.
We map individual portfolios against DNA characteristics that we’ve identified in the wider multi asset landscape. This is unique to Scopic. We believe that a portfolio’s DNA profile has implications for the investment journey we might expect under different market conditions, as well as for investor suitability.
We don’t monitor investment portfolio returns according to a pre-set calendar by only looking at monthly, quarterly, or annualised performance figures. Instead, we monitor performance between the dates of key inflection points in financial market returns. We think this helps to provide both ourselves and users of our research with a better understanding of the likely investment journey and how individual multi asset portfolios navigate financial markets.
We aim to help users of our research to understand the likely investment journey that their clients might expect, and the objectives that are likely to be prioritised under different market conditions.
We believe that this helps to foster greater tolerance by intermediaries during periods of apparent tepid performance when our research suggests that this was always a potential outcome in certain market conditions. Just as importantly, it can enable intermediaries to be more critical at times when performance is at odds with what we might have expected.
We don’t believe that a portfolio’s volatility should be the sole determinant of ‘risk’ and client suitability. We think that addressing client suitability requires a more personalised approach. This might involve asking:
Determining suitability is of course the sole responsibility of the intermediary and is dependent upon an individual client’s circumstances. However, we aim to structure our research in a way that makes it easier for intermediaries to make more informed investment decisions.