Top Rated Adviser

I am delighted to announce that Solomons has achieved Top Rated Adviser status and appears in The Times money section today. This is due to an impartial website called VouchedFor where you can leave a review. Due to our consistently high scores (not perfect scores) we have now become part of a very small elite group. I am very thankful to all of you that provided reviews and for taking the time to express your thoughts.

Despite the endorsement, I continue to try to improve what we do, the services we offer and making it easier, clearer, quicker and more valuable for anyone to seek advice from us. As a small firm we live and die on our service and now having celebrated our 15th year in August we are becoming more like the company I hoped to create. Its the little improvements that tend to make a significant difference, but we certainly punch above our weight and can access all of the very best solutions for our clients, using the latest technology available.

If you have a smart phone or tablet, you could try out our APP. If you wish to discuss your planning with me, please pick up the phone or send me an email.

Dominic Thomas

Top Rated AdviserDominic2023-12-01T12:39:34+00:00

Financial Planning as Architecture

Financial planning as architecture

I don’t know why, but I love architectural drawings, I have done for as long as I can remember. Perhaps it has something to do with childhood and making things, imagining new worlds or ways of being. I didn’t become an architect because, whilst my maths was good, I was, as a schoolboy rather hopeless at Physics, which I was told was vital to a successful career as an architect. Those that know me, will perhaps recall that I sometimes refer to what I do as financial architecture, designing a plan is much like designing a building, but it is on its own useless unless acted upon (and built).

I’ve been mulling over how I develop the firm. How do we do things differently, so that they are radical, clear and distinct whilst being of the highest quality that we can create. This has been a particular frustration this week due to the replacement of something as simple as a printer. Ours was at the end of its 6 year life, it had been state of the art, but actually rather too big for what we required in 2014. The replacement is worse despite supposedly having the advantage of 6 years technological advancement, it cannot or will not print on our high quality paper and initially it spewed most of it onto the floor. We still are not at the end of this tedious trial of wits. But it did remind me of Steve Jobs asking how on earth his team had managed to design a word processor without any font choice… kind of the entire point.

Anyway, back to architecture and financial planning. Let’s continue the metaphor of your dream home (your life) and you want to build it… its a metaphor for your life, so go with me.. you aren’t going to buy an existing building, but create and build your own… because only you can build your life.

An architect will help convert your hopes and dreams into a design. These days due to CAD technology you can even walk through the building before its been built. The level of detail that you provide directly increases the degree of satisfaction that you will receive from your new home… details down to the where the sockets will go, the eye-line views and the comfort of the bath. The more you reveal of yourself and your plans to the architect, the better the result. In short, the work will be as good as “the brief’.

Staying with the metaphor, your own Grand Design of course requires builders to make it happen and these each have their own disciplines, electricians and so on. They are skilled at what they do, but they are not architects, though of course have invaluable hands-on experience. However, invariably they stick to what they know and don’t push the boundaries of innovation and design, unlike architects. The builders require pay and oversight. They are the labour, but of course need the raw materials – brick, stone, wood, steel, cement, copper, glass and so on..all of which vary in price dependant upon quality and economic supply and demand.

As anyone knows, building can go over budget, cost rather more than hoped or planned. The process can also take rather longer than expected for any number of reasons, most of which are outside of the control of the architect or the builder. So there is an old proverb, from Proverbs, which basically says be careful to properly cost a building project and not build something you cannot afford. This is often the message that people like Sarah Beeny and Kevin McCloud remind audiences.

Finally don’t forget that to build, you need planning approval and in general the local planning authority is there to ensure that the builders and architect are creating something that suits the local area and complies with the current best practices and laws. Whilst often seen as a hindrance, this has a place and in my metaphor would probably describe the role and importance of regulation, which all adds to the costs, but is a form of insurance for us all.

Remember that this is simply a metaphor, the dream house is your life, you get to decide how you live and what you do, the architect needs to know this, so that it suits your budget and your requirements….so that it works. Of course buildings can be inspirational… as lives can be, yours and mine…. sounds like a line from Mr McCloud himself!

Dominic Thomas

Financial Planning as ArchitectureDominic2023-12-01T12:39:33+00:00

When the clouds are seen

Here is a piece by Steve Williams of Cormorant Capital Strategies. Steve helps me with the investment committee and provides invaluable impartial and independent external expertise.

When the clouds are seen

The October edition of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) World Economic Outlook reveals an expectation for global growth to amount to 3.3% in 2014 and 3.8% in 2015. That compares with growth in the Emerging Market and Developing Economies which is expected to reach 4.4% and 5.0% respectively.

If the IMF are right, the remainder of the year will see the fastest pace of expansion, among the emerging market economies, in Asia (6.5%). Asian growth will eclipse that in Emerging and Developing Europe (2.7%), Latin America (1.3%) and the Middle East (2.7%). Only Sub Saharan Africa (with output expanding at 5.1%) will see growth at anything like the pace set by Asia. Asia’s charge into the lead is boosted, in part, by an improved outlook for India…

‘In India, growth is expected to increase in the rest of 2014 and 2015, as exports and investment continue to pick up and more than offset the effect of an unfavorable

[sic] monsoon on agricultural growth earlier in the year.’
I’m a little less certain that India can prevail in the next few years – high levels of corruption and stalled infrastructure improvements represent formidable barriers. But there are good reasons to be optimistic.

Foremost among them is the incumbency of the impressive Mr Raghuram Rajan as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Presenting him with the award for Best Central Bank Governor of 2014, Euromoney explained that ‘his tough monetary medicine combatted the storm ravaging the deficit-ridden economy in the recent emerging market crisis’. Indeed, I suspect the Indian central bank’s performance during the ‘taper tantrum’ did much to deflate fears that were apparent well beyond the boundaries of the sub-continent.

In addition, assuming that slowing global growth keeps a lid on commodity prices, India’s high rate of inflation will slow without the need for tighter monetary policy thereby affording India’s central bank the opportunity to underwrite faster growth. In any case investors in the emerging markets must be cognisant of the risks they face.

Most notable among them is the threat from a reversal of the flow of cheap capital that these economies have enjoyed in the last few years as central banks in the West supported liquidity. Just such a reversal is already underway. Beginning in May last year – when Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, first mooted some tapering in the pace of its stimulus package – the MSCI Emerging Market index has underperformed the MSCI World Index by 10% having shed and then regained close to a fifth of its value along the way.

Steve Williams

When the clouds are seenDominic2023-12-01T12:39:33+00:00

Dark October Days

There is something about October that makes me feel somewhat downbeat. Perhaps it is waking up in the dark and then coming home in the dark. The weather is generally pretty grey and miserable, autumn, for all its glorious colours is truning into winter and the summer feels like a distant memory. I also find walking the dog much more of an effort – wellies and avoiding the rutting stag in Richmond Park. This is cold-catching time and to say that markets tend to catch a cold in October would be an understatement.

Most will remember the more infamous “Black Monday” market crash of October 1987 with the FTSE100 falling 12.22% in a single day. More recently October 2008 provided some of the most terrifying and largest single day falls (in percentage terms) ever on 6th falling 7.85%, 10th falling 8.85% and 15th falling 7.16%. Today as I write, the markets are once again “in a state of turmoil” depending on what you read and who you listen to, as news is digested and responded to.

However, despite this “evidence” on 16 October 2008 the FTSE100 stood at 4,377.30 yesterday it closed at 6,211.64. Despite the news, markets have been rising and opened at the start of this month at 6,211.60 Looking at short-term statistics is very unhelpful, add in the occassional image of a stockbroker clutching a phone, peering at a monitor or holding his head in in hands and the scene is set for the appearance of further market chaos and sentiments of “you simply cannot trust the markets”. Well, in practice, despite October having what appears to be an unusually larger than fair share of bad days hostorically, it isnt actually much different from other months. Markets rise and fall, reflecting sentiment about the state of the world, which invariably has little to do with reality. This is partly due to several European countries still struggling to generate economic growth and the US finding life harder going. This is not really a new phenomena is it?

Keep to the long-term principles of investing, if you are keen to make a short-term play then a market fall is essentially a discount, some would argue “a more accurate value” but either way, sitting on the sidelines waiting for the markets to rise again before getting back in is the wrong choice. So stay the course, keep to the game plan.

Dominic Thomas

Dark October DaysDominic2023-12-01T12:39:32+00:00

Uncertainty is Normal

There is much in the news to concern even the most stoic of people, however without ignoring the considerable challenges that the world faces, perhaps we could take some comfort from the past, which reveals that uncertainty is normal.

I think I may have fallen for Eleanor Roosevelt (who would be 130 today). If you follow me on twitter you will have gathered that I’ve not made time of late to blog as I would like to and have taken to more tweets to remind myself and perhaps others that time…and life is short. Of course I had heard of Eleanor Roosevelt, but in truth didn’t know that much about her. I knew that she was the wife of President F.D Roosevelt and that he was a something of a Lothario. The image to the right is the movie poster for Hyde Park on Hudson, which, if I recall doesn’t even include Eleanor, but many of the women in F.D Roosevelt’s life, the image is rather pertinent and could be her obscured by his position – though in practice she wasn’t and even publicly disagreed with some of his policies.

Eleanor was, by all accounts a brilliant First Lady. Anyway, one of the quotations I came across for her was this one:

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along…. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

I am probably guilty of looking at life through a rather narrow lens, one that tends to see the life example with a financial planning element to it. Today as I write the markets are beginning to react, as they always do, to uncertainty in the news. This time it is the anxiety about the spread of the Ebola virus. I am neither a medic, nor a scientist and do not wish to dismiss this as unimportant, clearly it is a serious problem and one that could be devastating if some of our wildest horrors materialize. However, anxiety and bad news are the normal. We have never known the future, which frankly is probably a good thing. This weekend we could spend considerable energy worrying about any number of things, the problems on the Turkish border, Ebola, European economies, ageing populations, limited resources, climate change, war in Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya… and of course I could add hundreds more.

The financial services industry often trades on the promise of security, something that even the Regulator and Ombudsman appear to occasionally believe possible. Yet in practice the security that money or wealth bring is illusory when real disaster strikes. It certainly can make life considerably easier in the comfort of a fair, prosperous society, but has little value when society collapses. Eleanor Roosevelt says:

“There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavour.”

So, we do what we can. We grapple with an uncertain future attempting to make the best decisions from the choices before us and the information available. Uncertainty is normal. Market over-reaction to news good and bad is normal. Strangely, these unusual times are decidedly normal, as history reminds us for those that care to look.

Dominic Thomas – Solomons

Uncertainty is NormalDominic2023-12-01T12:39:32+00:00