Polestar Wealth Management Investment Committee

Polestar Wealth Management 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. Your adviser will provide you with the most suitable framework for the service we offer.

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 Polestar 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.