Increasing focus on yield and defensive assets
A nationwide survey examining the impact of recent market volatility on financial advisers has found they are focusing their attention on income and dividend yield as well as defensive assets, Global Value Investors (GVI) said today.
According to the survey of over 300 advisers, 72 per cent of respondents said that more than half of their clients would have negative returns on their investment portfolio for the current year.
The survey found that over half of the respondents thought the income component of total returns would ‘definitely’ play a more important role in shaping clients’ portfolios, while nearly a third thought it ‘possibly’ would.
“The uncertain and volatile markets of the past 12 months have led the vast majority of financial advisers surveyed to believe that income will play a more important role in the total returns of clients’ portfolios” GVI business manager William Tomac said.
Almost 90 per cent of advisers made some adjustments to their clients’ asset allocations in the past six months because of the changes in economic conditions, GVI said.
Of those advisers, 38 per cent had moved their clients into defensive or capital preservation assets, while 29 per cent had moved to income-focused investments.
Sixty two per cent of the respondents also felt that traditional benchmarks were becoming outdated as a measurement of risk and performance.
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