Old Mill Investment Committee
Our Investment Committee is responsible for the construction, maintenance and ongoing governance of our portfolios and long-term investment strategy. The committee held a meeting in January with its external independent adviser – Albion Strategic Consulting (Albion). Albion provides ongoing research on investment matters including reviewing the latest evidence supporting or challenging our approach at the philosophical, asset allocation and fund levels. Topics on the day included:
10th February 2025
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Gavin Jones See profile
Our main document, setting out roles and responsibilities, has been updated. Product Information Management (PIM) will become more involved with the investment committee as we see more investors on their platform.
A quick look into practical tools used at Old Mill daily. AI can be used to take meeting notes and provide an overall summary. It can generate action points quickly and easily. To illustrate the point, Albion recorded our meeting and sent AI generated minutes afterwards.
Albion has updated the literature templates it produces. We will review these to see if we can improve our investment literature.
Albion produces our main research document which is produced twice a year and challenges our investment philosophy to incorporate the latest evidence, theory and fund products available to us.
One of the topics frequently discussed in the media is the dominance of the US stock market as a share of the Global stock market. The success of large technology companies like Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft has meant their share valuation makes up an increasing share of the investable index. Our portfolios reduce the absolute exposure to each of these companies by diversifying – across regions, including emerging economies, having allocations to factors such as value and smaller companies, as well as holding defensive assets.
The governance update also covered sequence risk in detail. This is the threat to investment returns when you are taking an income from an investment portfolio during a market downturn which can impact how long your investments may last. If you are taking large withdrawals and there is a sharp and prolonged stock market fall at the beginning, this can result in your capital being depleted more quickly. The opposite is also true if your portfolio benefits from a sharply rising stock market to begin with, it has a much better chance of lasting long term.
Albion has been working on a tool we can use to consider the income you want to take, the sustainability of this and how long the income may be taken before the investments run out of value.