We take a highly disciplined approach to managing your investments. We begin by deciding on the overall structure of your portfolio, to ensure it contains the most appropriate balance between different asset types and geographical markets to achieve your particular investment objectives.

By avoiding over-concentration in any one stock, fund or market sector, we aim to achieve consistent, above average long-term performance without exposing our clients to undue volatility or risk.

We are not prescriptive about the investment approach and understand that some clients wish to be fully invested through collective funds, whilst others prefer a combination of direct securities and collectives. For those clients who wish to adopt a purely indexed approach we are willing to offer this service. For asset classes such as property, where there are no index tracking alternatives, we seek the best available substitutes.

We invest directly only in our core areas of expertise, primarily UK equities, and use a combination of talented third party managers and an index approach elsewhere.

Our investment philosophy is to invest in listed companies that have a viable business plan and a record of cash generation. Management is key to any company's success and we pride ourselves on our due diligence process - undertaking regular meetings with investee companies.

We have particular expertise and access to the 'wholesale markets' - Initial Public Offerings (IPO's), Rights Issues, Placings by companies to raise new share capital, and Placings by Known Sellers.

Although we do not rely solely on this approach the benefit of purchasing shares normally free of stamp duty and usually at a discount to the prevailing market price is clear to see.

In selecting funds we favour managers with consistently good performance and a robust and coherent investment approach. However in addition to this we use sophisticated analytical tools to understand the style bias of each individual fund and that of the combined portfolio.

In this way we can ensure our portfolios do not inadvertently become index trackers or have particular style bias that we are not cognisant of.