Fund Portfolio Construction

Unit Trusts & Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs)

We believe that a broadly diversified portfolio is key to ensuring the long-term growth and stability of our clients’ investments.  Stocks provide clients with the potential for capital growth and dividend income.  Unit trusts and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) provide them with broad diversification to reduce portfolio volatility and capture the long-term growth of the financial markets.

Our partnership with Dimensional Fund Advisers (DFA) and iFAST Financial (iFAST) enables us to provide clients with a wide selection of professionally managed funds and discretionary managed portfolios to diversify their investments.

Dimensional Funds: Low Cost, Evidence-Based Funds

DFA is a global investment manager dedicated to translating financial science into real-world investment solutions for clients worldwide.  DFA’s investment approach is backed by decades of empirical research and grounded in economic theory.  They do not attempt to time the market as they believe in the efficiency of the financial markets.  Instead, DFA chooses to spend time on research and designing portfolios based on their research findings.

DFA’s research has shown that securities which deliver higher expected returns share certain characteristics – known as “dimensions.”  The three primary dimensions affecting performance are relative value, profitability, and smaller capitalisation.  By overweighting in securities that possess these dimensions, investors are expected to enjoy above-market returns over the long term.

iFAST Discretionary Portfolio Management Solution (DPMS)

iFAST is a leading wealth management Fintech platform that offers a wide selection of investment products to clients across Asia.  iFAST DPMS is a managed portfolio service that helps investors invest in a globally diversified portfolio of unit trusts and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).  The iFAST DPMS portfolios are designed, monitored and regularly rebalanced by iFAST’s experienced investment team and portfolio manager.

iFAST DPMS adopts a GDP-weighted approach to asset allocation.  Each country’s allocation in the portfolio is based on the size of its economy.  This is unlike other fund managers who generally adopt a market-cap-weighted approach to asset allocation based on the size of the country’s stock market.  The GDP-weighted approach has shown to provide broader diversification and better captures economic growth as compared to the market cap-weighted approach.

Understanding Bear Markets

Recorded in May 2020 for LPA's Valued Client Seminar

Understanding Bear Markets

Recorded in May 2020 for LPA's Valued Client Seminar