Our Approach
We offer a wide range of products and services for both personal and corporate clients, which are designed to maximise your ability to achieve financial planning success.
The Wealth Navigation System
Your support and work is fee based which means you are in control of the advice process and no work is done until those fees are agreed. We are able to provide tailored financial solutions by considering all the products relevant to you.
As you would expect any fee is agreed prior to each stage. You, as a current client or prospective client, can exit at any stage ensuring you maintain control of the whole process.
- 1) Discovery or Review Meeting
I start by listening carefully to your objectives, needs and priorities, in the context of your short, medium and long term financial aspirations. By gathering information from you, I begin to understand your current situation and what provisions you have in place already. Then, by exploring your hopes and aspirations, I can construct a picture of what you want to achieve, taking into account your knowledge, experience and attitude to risk and return. This stage also allows you to understand what to expect from us and how you will benefit from using my services. - 2) Research to Build Client Plan
I’ll explore and research various scenarios and options and start to put together a road map to help you move towards achieving your objectives. I will assess the suitability of your current plans and make recommendations to help you achieve your current and future objectives. - 3) Present Plan & Recommendations
I’ll sit down with you and go through your plan and recommendations answering any questions you may have. - 4) Implement Plan & Recommendations
Here’s where your plans start to take shape. Most of my clients prefer us to complete, check and manage the documentation required for them to put ‘Their Plan’ into action. This saves them a lot of time and energy, and helps ensure that plans are set up in line with expectations. The cost of this service will be included in the fee structure that has been agreed. Alternatively you may decide you wish to implement my recommendations yourself, and so can simply pay a fee for my time and expertise up to this point. - 5) Client Support, Your Choice
I believe that most clients will benefit from a review of their circumstances and I offer a range of options. This may depend on which stage of life you are in as well as your relative level of wealth. Many clients like to meet up regularly to take advantage of valuable allowances, or understand the impact of UK Government Budget announcements. You may also hear from us at other times during the year when I feel something may be of interest to you, or you may wish to get in touch yourself, if your circumstances or objectives have changed.
The Sky Blue Wealth Management Investment Policy Committee
The Sky Blue Wealth Management Investment Policy Committee meets regularly to ensure that the information clients receive remains up to date and relevant.
The growth of assets depends upon our unrestricted access to all investment options on our clients behalf as we work for them. Being independent advisers provides our clients with the best possible framework for the service we offer any restriction would compromise our support of you.
We are not predicting the market and its future we are simply helping you capture the market returns our clients deserve based on their exposure to risk in the most cost efficient way possible.
The Sky Blue Wealth Management Investment Philosophy
This sets out our investment philosophy, it explains what we do with our clients money and why. We believe that if our clients know what to expect from us and from their investments we will have a more productive relationship.
Core Beliefs
Our philosophy is based upon several key beliefs about financial markets. These beliefs lead us to construct carefully structured investment portfolios that are designed to meet the investment needs of our clients.
Our beliefs are that:
Capitalism Works:
Capitalism is what underpins the world’s economy and is overwhelmingly the most successful economic model that mankind has devised. The free market is a simple mechanism that brings together ideas for products and services, and the finance required to get them off the ground.
People who invest in an enterprise are taking a risk with their capital and are therefore entitled to share any financial rewards – just as they should accept any losses. This simple principle is followed in every corner of the world from the dusty markets of third-world villages to the board rooms of the world’s richest corporations. In more sophisticated markets, the rules of this process are codified by formal capital markets and most investors participate through tightly regulated exchanges of shares and bonds.
Risk and Return are Related:
We believe it is impossible to improve your investment return without taking more risk. In other words, the potential for financial loss you expose yourself to in taking a risk is also the reason you earn a return. There is good risk and bad risk and higher exposure to the right risk factors leads to higher expected returns, but is no guarantee of them. Risk is the premium investors pay for the expectation of a greater return.
Our role as your adviser is first to identify which risks offer consistently higher expected returns and which do not, and then to offer you exposure to those risks in a structured, disciplined and cost effective way.
Markets Work:
Capital markets are the best mechanism we have to calculate the value of an asset. Many investors believe they are able to price assets more accurately than the market. They perform research and analysis to arrive at a price for an asset. If the market price is below their calculated price they might buy that asset to make a profit when it rises.
But however carefully they make their calculation; it is never more than an estimate upon which they base a prediction. Some estimates will be right; some estimates will be wrong.
Very few people are able to make consistently accurate estimates over a reasonable period of time so we do not use predictions about markets or prices in our portfolios. This principle applies across our investment philosophy which means we do not buy individual stocks we think will outperform the market; or weight investments towards countries or regions we expect to do well. Instead we use investment funds with broad exposure to the whole market and allocate assets to countries in proportion to their relative size in the global market.
We therefore accept that the market, powered by the wealth-generating capability of capitalism, provides an adequate rate of return. We do not try to beat the market with predictions; instead we harness the returns of the market through discipline and structure.
Diversification is Essential:
Diversification is the principle of spreading your investment risk around. Our investment portfolios therefore hold the shares and bonds of many companies and governments in many countries around the world. Because we believe in the power of capital markets rather than individual predictions or judgements, we are able to invest our clients’ assets in many thousands of individual investments. This means the negative and positive influence of each individual investment is reduced, producing, on aggregate, less risk in our portfolios.
Comprehensive service
Graham Foster has been my financial adviser for so long that I cannot remember a time when my wife and I did not enjoy the benefit of his guidance and support. I would guess that we met 20 years ago, I have followed Graham each time he has moved employment and am now delighted to embark with him on his own venture, Sky Blue Wealth Management. I have now been retired for five years, and Graham’s comprehensive service has continued unabated across the transition from the process of building a pension fund to reliance upon it. We regard Graham as a good friend who is fully informed about our family circumstances and needs, and upon whom we can rely to protect our resources and help us to live within them.