Your investment advisory journey with us begins with extensive due diligence of your current investment portfolio, developing an understanding of your investment goals and then constructing the kind of investment portfolio that suits your investor personality. Your journey starts with a vigorous consultation with one of our skilled wealth advisers to better understand your financial and personal circumstances. This is the first step towards building a longstanding, collaborative and well-informed investor relationship.

Managing, protecting and growing your wealth requires a well-developed and proven wealth management process that integrates with your holistic financial planning. Put yourself in the best position to achieve your short-, medium- and long-term investment goals.

Investment Advisory

From equities, property, bonds, offshore asset allocation to unit trusts, ETF’s, TFSA’s, retirement planning, global investment structuring, choosing the right investment option can be a tricky task. At Cornerstone, we know precisely how to put your money to work for you, finding the perfect investment opportunities that minimise risk while delivering maximum returns.

Don’t let your money waste away in low-yield savings accounts. Let us help you pick out exciting investment opportunities that are ideally suited to your risk profile while managing expectations to deliver the rewards you truly deserve.

Local Investment Planning
Offshore Investment Planning
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How do we go about our wealth planning process?

Wealth Management Process

Needs and goals

Developing a clear vision of your goals and needs is vital to the long-term success of your investments. Through continuous consultation and backed by the unfailing support of sophisticated tools and investment partnerships, we will endeavour to make sure that we fully understand your investment goals and objectives.

Estate Planning Considerations

Understanding how your wealth affects your estate planning is critical. The global and local tax and fiduciary environments are complex. Your wealth management strategies – both globally and locally – need to integrate into your estate planning, reflecting the nature and scope of your overall estate considerations in the long and short terms.

Tax Planning

Paying needless tax is counterproductive to your portfolio’s growth and wealth accumulation. Ensuring that we invest, allocate and distribute your funds in the most tax-efficient manner forms the basis of one of our principal tax planning considerations.

When it comes to investing, each of us has unique objectives, investment expectations and different emotions, goals and preferences. Our financial personality framework combines psychology with economic theory to try and better understand how you are likely to react to various investment approaches and market conditions.

Investing in the short, medium or long term requires you to be comfortable with the way your investment portfolio reacts as markets rise and fall. Market shifts can trigger emotional responses in investors that often result in poor investment outcomes.

By using our Risk Profiling system, we can obtain a more accurate understanding of your tolerance for risk or volatility. The risk tolerance report forms an integral part of your investment mandate or Investment Policy Document (IPD) which is developed in collaboration with you.

It is this IPD that sets the foundation of our investment relationship going forward.

After developing a better understanding of your investor profile, we will determine how the capital in your portfolio should be allocated between the various asset classes. Diversifying your capital across a range of different asset classes, both globally and locally, is essential in managing risk in your portfolio. These varying classes are carefully and deliberately blended or weighted to match each investor profile. Asset allocation decisions, in turn, are taken as a result of constant global shifts in sentiment and value.

Our discretionary fund management partners have access to a vast, global universe of funds and make use of an in-depth screening process. This includes a complete investment and operational review to ensure the selected funds are compliant, reputable and reliable.

Blending the correct asset allocation with appropriately selected funds results in your target portfolio allocation. Over time this target portfolio allocation will change due to shifts in the market environment and evolving conditions. We ensure that your portfolio is appropriately adjusted when it “drifts” away from your optimal asset allocation.

What are the building blocks of your investor’s portfolio?

An investment portfolio that is constructed to meet your financial requirements typically involves various service providers that contribute to the management and ultimate cost of the portfolio.

Our primary responsibility is to ensure that your investment objectives are met most effectively. This involves a deep understanding of the regulatory environment, tax laws, product information, investment principles and other market developments to create an investment portfolio based on your specific requirements.

This naturally requires that we gain a deep understanding of you, your specific goals and objectives and your current assets, liabilities and required cash flows. To implement your investment portfolio, we will select other appropriate role players (discussed below) and ensure they effectively fulfil their duties.

The administrative platform selected is an important link between the various role-players. It provides you with an array of legalities (e.g. voluntary investments, living annuities etc.) that we can select from to meet your needs. The platform needs to provide the systems to manage your investments while adhering to onerous regulatory requirements. The most significant benefit of an administrative platform, however, is not the accessibility of the product, but the choice of unit trust funds that underlie the product itself.

The platform essentially provides one point of access to an array of fund managers. It is important to remember that it is not the platform that ultimately generates a return but it is the underlying investments (unit trusts) within the product that generates the return.

Economic modelling, optimal asset allocation and fund selection are highly specialised fields that require enormous amounts of expertise, investment capability, capacity, research and skill. As such, we outsource these specialised investment fields to selected discretionary managers (DFM’s).

Then, based on a specific mandate, DFMs will decide, in collaboration with the investor, on an appropriate asset allocation (mix of local and offshore equities, cash, bonds and property), as well as selecting the unit trusts used to express that asset allocation. The portfolio is implemented via the administrative platform (discussed above) and is managed on an ongoing basis.

Ongoing management involves the rebalancing of the portfolio to ensure consistency of returns within the mandate. This includes implementing mandate changes (by you and your adviser), supported by the asset management views of the DFM.

  • Developing the long-term strategic asset allocation path that is most likely to ensure that your required return goals are met while dealing with the least amount of risk;
  • Selecting underlying unit trusts and working with the fund managers that are aligned to your strategic goals, and thus most likely to generate excess returns when compared to the fund benchmarks within the various asset classes ;
  • Blending those underlying unit trusts within and across the asset classes to create the most efficient and lucrative portfolio possible.

The DFM (discussed above) is responsible for selecting the underlying fund managers, unit trust and most effective investment instruments (ETF’s, etc.) that will be used to implement the required asset allocation of your portfolio. Typically, the underlying fund manager has a pre-defined mandate within a given asset class to which they must adhere in managing their unit trust. The underlying fund managers, therefore, function as expert specialists in managing their respective asset classes and are mandated to pursue superior returns relative to an appropriate benchmark at any given time.

The Result?

By blending specialist managers within specific asset classes and having our DFM managing your overall asset allocation, we’re able to tap into the wealth of knowledge and expertise that comes with having bespoke professional resources applying their skills to your portfolio. The outsourcing of certain functions allows us, your specialist investment advisor, to focus on investment advice and to work to achieve your goals and objectives. This ultimately ensures that the expertise and skills of each contributor are being deployed in the most efficient manner possible.

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