Our investment portfolios are carefully designed to help international investors to balance risk and return.
Three pillars to successful investing
i) Keep costs down
We cannot control the markets. We cannot control the economy. We can control costs.
One of the best predictors of future returns for your portfolio is the cost of your investments.
In other words, low-cost investments are expected to provide better returns for your portfolio than high-cost investments.
For that reason, we build our retirement portfolios using ultra-low-cost index funds. This helps to improve the success rate of your retirement plan and reduces the risk of you running out of money in later life.
ii) Own tax efficient investments
Warren Buffet says his favourite holding period is forever. When it comes to expat investing for retirement, we tend to agree.
While buying an investment and holding it forever may not practical for most retirees, we can at least create portfolios with “low turnover.”
Every time you buy or sell an investment, you incur costs. Not just obvious costs like transaction fees and taxes, but hidden costs like bid-offer spreads.
These costs eat away at your investment returns.
To protect your investment returns and mitigate taxes, we target investments with low turnover.
iii) Own the right asset classes
Not all investments are created equal. Just because you can invest your money into something (e.g. Bitcoin), does not mean that you should.
We only invest in asset classes that:
- Have been proven through academic research to provide superior risk-adjusted returns over time
- Work well when invested together in a diversified portfolio (e.g. low and/or negative correlation to each other)