From the beginning of July we have seen a reasonable bit of growth coming through the figures and this has been encouraging. It certainly lifts peoples spirits, that’s for sure. This all kind of stalled in September and at first I thought that it was people profit taking i.e. taking out their growth when they had a chance of getting some growth – as opposed to losses – but this all changed last week when the Dow fell something like 3.4% in the ONE day – which is significant. It later turned out that the official inflation stats were published that day and the markets reacted badly. Very badly. When the Dow falls – that affects global markets as the States is the biggest economy.

Now it is all too easy to say that as global markets are down then we should do this that or the next thing. NO – nothing of the kind. This once again is the situation where you need to do your research on funds to try and identify what funds are affected and why. Our analysis shows that we are seeing reductions right across the board with only a minor exception here and there – so it is a global trend.

One major way that you can reduce such losses is to take a good spread of funds and this is a spread of geographical areas, as well as types of focus of funds, as well as types of funds. At MAP for the vast majority of clients we tend to pick 1 spread of 10 funds, which we think is manageable enough as well as giving a good spread. At MAP we also take a spread of risks as well, because we do focus on what funds are low risk, medium risk or high risk, and you need to take a spread of all of these. Our standard split for a lot of clients is 3 low 4 medium and 3 high, and this not only gives a spread of risks, but also types and areas as well.

Our long term research just now is looking at fund performance over 5 years but that is only the start. We also look at fund performance over the previous 3 months, although at the current time this is only for the last 9 weeks since it seems that just about every fund up to the end of June lost money – so it is only worthwhile looking at performances from the beginning of July. By looking at both long term and short term, you can start to see the trends as to where funds are going – and that is vitally important. This is what research does – it gives you almost “inside” information although I would say that it is more insight information as it will give you a better insight as to where you might place future investments.

This is what we do at MAP – we work hard at putting our clients money into investment funds that are likely to grow – and you can only get this once you have done the research.

This is why our fund choices actually deliver for our clients because they are choices based on FACTS.

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