Merry Christmas!
You don’t write, you don’t call
The whole team would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
This time of the year allows us to catch our collective breath and reflect on how far we have come since New Year’s Day. Unfortunately the general workload has prevented me from committing the time required to write my regular blogs.
Maybe you have missed them, maybe you haven’t even noticed. We are all so busy today, and all suffer from information overload.
So you can deduce by my silence that – no investment or financial planning news, is good news – If it wasn’t, I would have written some blogs in the intervening period.
So what has kept us so busy?
Obviously a lot of my time is taken up monitoring the markets and reading extensively to gauge the level of investor sentiment. We have introduced quite a few new shares into our managed portfolios and retired a few older ones which appear past their best. We have re-developed our central client relationship management software to hopefully streamline the business going forward. We have welcomed more new clients than usual, probably because typical advisers were shown to have done very little in 2020 with many actually furloughing their staff but continuing to charge the same level of fees.
We returned the whole team back to the office full time in July and re-commenced holding regular face-to-face client review meetings. The biggest consumer of time by far however has been the platform transfer of clients from Nucleus & A.J.Bell to Transact. I have included links below to the series of blogs I have written this year that mention the reasoning behind this transfer and the steps you can to take to join the process.
Zero to £50,000,000 in 9 months
We now have £50 million on the Transact Platform which is a little more than the amount that remains on the Nucleus Platform. Progress has been steady, but slower than we had hoped for. However we are at the halfway point and hopeful to have brought all eligible clients across within the initial two year target period. The results are starting to show through now, with slightly enhanced returns to those clients that are on the Transact Platform now relative to the returns they would have had on the Nucleus Platform. Operationally the Transact Platform flies! We had become used to the speed that Nucleus ran at, but now we can get so much more done in the same time.
If you want to see the costs and the benefits of making a switch personally then give our comparison calculator a try. You can find it here if you would like to take a look and maybe start your transfer across. Simply run the calculator and sign our online client agreement. (Don’t worry it hasn’t changed since you signed your last paper version.)
Investment Performance Review
The end of year investment review will follow in Early January. Let’s hope the markets and Omicron behave themselves up to year end at least.
Office Opening
We will be closing the office Tuesday lunchtime to give the whole team a well deserved break. If you need anything urgently we will be checking our inboxes once a day throughout the working days until we return on the 4th January.
Thanks Howard and all the team. You continue to inspire confidence and do a great job. Enjoy your family time and recharge the batteries. Best wishes for a prosperous 2022. Geoff & Julie
Many thanks for all the good work that’s gone into this year. Best wishes for a Merry Christmas & prosperous New to all.
Michael & Susan
Thank you to the whole team. We know you are amazing and we have every faith in everything you do and advise. We appreciate it has been a tough year for you all but despite all this you have always been at the end of the phone to appease any concerns, thank you for that. We wish you a restful and happy Christmas with your family and a truly beautiful new year.
Best wishes.
Barrie and Val