1. Make your bets on companies whose business model you understand
It’s always essential to completely understand what you’ve invested in rather than invest in every shiny opportunity that presents itself. There may be a lot of noise and cry in the market about the next big thing, one day it may be Bitcoin, while the next it may be Ripple or even weed stocks. However, it is essential that you keep your wits about you while investing. Look at strong metrics such as per capita product consumption, past returns, future projections, input costs and margins before making any kind of investment. You must be confident enough to forecast different projections for the firm based on your understanding and confidence level in the market. When you ignore this basic tenet and invest in companies or channels that you don’t understand, you stand a high possibility of watching your investment go bust. Avoid being seduced by the new opportunity in the block, the ‘boring’ groundwork and research is where the real gold (scope for building wealth in the long term) lies. The top billionaires in the investment space, such as Warren Buffet, advocate this philosophy. It’s all about being sure about what you know and betting on that.
2. Always hedge your bets
There’s always an endowment bias when it comes to investment decisions. Investors often make the habit of making predictions about stock performance without considering all the kinds of risk factors. Hence, we are often overly optimistic about our prospects which may backfire in our face. It’s important to be conservative about the prospects of an investment. It helps if you have data and analytics helping you hedge your bets rather than relying on pure instinct. All speculation must have a strong backing in data and an appropriate distribution of asset allocation must be maintained between high exposure investments like stocks and low-risk debt funds.
3. Minimize Costs, Expenses, and Fees
Professionally managed firms and family offices may charge high fees for management and advisory fees. This can either be in the form of a percentage of assets or in the form of a flat fee/retainer. It’s even more dangerous if they earn income through commissions as their financial interests may be at odds with yours. This fee can heavily eat into your long term corpus generation in various ways due to the interest lost on the amount that would have otherwise compounded. Hence it’s better to go for a Robo Advisor or a wealth management firm that subsidises is management fee by providing Robo Advisory services rather than using a Human advisor for all client interaction. The cost-saving by the Wealth Management firm is transferred to the benefit of the investor.
4. Maintain your portfolio boundaries
Be very clear on what level of exposure you are comfortable with in terms of risk and what profits you will be happy with. If you have data and analytics driving your decisions, you can set up a flagging mechanism to raise a red flag whenever a trade hits an upper or a lower limit. Setting boundaries for your portfolio help you minimize the probability of a loss. It’s important to be opportunistic, but it’s also essential that you aren’t too greedy. A very diverse portfolio with an appropriate mix of funds from across industries will help you create a portfolio that performs well in a bull or bear market.
5.Leverage Technology
Nowadays, wealth management paradigm has shifted and investment managers are using technology to back their decision making. Wealth management software and platforms have emerged which use a combination of AI and Analytics to de-risk investments. Robo advisory services are now part and parcel of every Wealth Management firm’s offering. These services help firms crunch the numbers and make data-driven decisions about investing. Robo-advisors provide the right kind of recommendations and give a wealth of analytics and historical data to help guide investment choices. These technologies also take care of monotonous tasks such as asset reallocation, portfolio attribution, KYC, onboarding amongst others and provide great transparency to investors. This helps Wealth Managers free up a large portion of their time and dedicate it to providing excellent customer servicing.
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