Insights
We offer a range of thought-leadership content, news and updates to support your day-to-day activity.
Quarterly market and economic update - Q3 2022
01 August 2022
This is the first addition of a document produced by Defaqto and it covers financial markets, in particular the performance of various key asset classes over the last few months, along with the current global economic backdrop.
How to apply ESG preferences in Defaqto Engage
03 March 2022
We have recently covered the introduction of the ESG Questionnaire, which is now available in Engage to help assess a clients’ ESG preferences. Once captured, the questionnaire responses can be used as the basis of identifying suitable investments, by applying the corresponding ESG filters during the fund research process.
Financial advisers are getting into PMI
03 February 2022
In research undertaken by Defaqto in October 2021, advisers were asked to indicate which individual protection products they use in their recommendations. Unsurprisingly, term assurance (level and decreasing), critical illness cover and income protection insurance were the most popular products with similar levels of support to previous years. Sadly, family income benefit and whole of life assurance received less support this time. However, an interesting development is the increased level of support for private medical insurance (PMI) among this sample of respondents, who were for the large part general practitioners and mortgage brokers, not PMI specialists.
Multi-asset income funds
14 January 2022
Multi-asset funds, as their name suggests, contain investments across several different asset classes - equities, bonds, cash, real estate and possibly other ‘alternative’ asset classes - with the fund manager deciding on the proportion going into each. In the case of multi-asset income funds, the emphasis will be on those asset classes producing a ‘natural’ income, in particular bonds, including high yield and emerging market debt, real estate and equities paying decent dividends.
Multi-asset funds: risk and suitability
04 January 2022
Multi-asset funds, as their name suggests, contain investments across several different asset classes - equities, bonds, cash, real estate and possibly other ‘alternative’ asset classes - with the fund manager deciding on the proportion going into each. At the one end of the spectrum, those funds investing mainly in equities, in particular with a significant Emerging Market component, would be expected to deliver higher returns over the medium to long term but also come with greater volatility; while at the other end of the spectrum multi-asset funds containing mostly bonds and cash should be less risky but will probably give less return in the long run. The latter would likely be more suitable for investors in or close to retirement and/or those uncomfortable taking risk while the former will probably be used by clients with a long time to retirement and able to tolerate higher volatility in order to achieve greater returns.