One of the first questions I ask prospective clients is whether they have a budget. Whether you have enough income to cover your expenditure several times over, or you are drawing down on assets to fund your liabilities, the importance of a budget is high.

Our initial conversations with prospective clients typically centre around two common themes – people want reassurance that their investment portfolio is tax-efficient given their complex tax reporting obligations, and they want their investments to generate returns so that their financial goals can be satisfied over the long-term.

At MASECO we look to overweight value stocks in our worldwide equity allocations. Value investing is an investment strategy that focuses on equities that are underappreciated by investors and the market at large.

A ‘Story Stock’ refers to shares of a company whose value is driven by expectations of outperformance, usually due to the commercial application of a new technology and intense media coverage, rather than a company’s underlying fundamental value, such as its earnings, assets, and profitability.

Investment returns have two parts: the expected return and the unexpected return. The expected return is the best guess of what will happen based on all the information currently available. The unexpected return is the surprise, the difference between what does happen and what was expected.

Back in January 2009, when MASECO was only 6 months old, our “Year in Review” article was named Annus Horribilis and covered the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. From a humanitarian and economic perspective, 2020 will be also be remembered as an ‘Annus Horribilis’ and will go down in the record books as one of the strangest years in memory.