Tracker Archives - Financial Planning in Surrey

In Need of Some Good News? Get on Your Bike

Dominic Thomas
Dec 2025 • 3 min read

In Need of Some Good News? Get on Your Bike…

If you cast your mind back to the Olympics in London 2012 with a lot of medals won by the British cycling team; you may recall that they attributed their success to lots of very small improvements, which resulted in an impressive medals haul. In a similar vein, the Timeline tracker portfolios will have a number of minor adjustments made in January, there are now suitable alternative funds at a lower price than have been used before. This will shave a little off the portfolio costs reducing them to about 0.06%-0.07% which is incredibly good value.

What is not changing is equally important. The risk profile, strategic asset allocation, and underlying market exposures remain unchanged. There is also no change to the style, size or regional characteristics of the portfolios, and therefore the expected behaviour over time is fully preserved.

Improved fund manager diversification

While diversification is primarily driven by the underlying securities, spreading exposure across several high-quality index managers provides added behavioural comfort with no downside to cost or operational efficiency.

Demonstrates best practice and regulatory foresight

The FCA has indicated a growing focus on governance, by ensuring that no single fund dominates the allocation and instead spreading exposure across several reputable managers, Timeline uphold strong governance standards and remain well-positioned for future regulatory developments.

Cost reduction

The revised Tracker weights result in a modest reduction in ongoing charges, particularly within fixed income, as illustrated in the table below.

This will not be applied to General Investment Accounts (GIAs) as these would trigger capital gains, though we shall be seeking to trigger and release some gains in the first three months of 2026 before the tax year ends.

Timeline, who recently scooped a bunch of investment awards, continue to provide one of the most compelling investment solutions and I am very pleased with how things are going. Our next quarterly investment committee meeting is in mid-January and I will be visiting Timeline in late January for further discussions.

We will of course provide all the relevant information that you may want via the platform. If you have any questions, please do get in touch.

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Tracker/Index funds

Sam Harris
May 2025 • 2 min read

Tracker/Index funds

You may have heard the terms ‘Tracker’ and ‘Index’ thrown around when we talk about investments or your portfolio, but what do these terms mean and what are the key features?

Simply put, a tracker portfolio aims to mimic the performance of global markets. This is typically done through index funds. An index in the context of stock markets is essentially just a list of companies. Though, there are often certain criteria a company must satisfy in order to be included, such as market capitalisation (the value of the company).

I’m sure you’re already familiar with well-known indices such as the FTSE 100, which is an index made up of the 100 largest British publicly traded companies. Or even the S&P 500 which is comprised of the 500 largest American companies. These funds ‘track’ the UK stock market and the American stock markets respectively.

Index tracking funds come with the added benefit of generally being less expensive than most alternatives. This is due to the passive nature of this type of investment, these funds are simply trying to replicate an index so most of the hard work has already been done by another organisation. For example, Vanguard might offer an equity fund which tracks the FTSE 100 index, however the index itself is calculated and maintained by FTSE Russell.

The Tracker portfolios we use at Solomon’s are prime examples of utilising index funds to ensure investments are well diversified. Meaning, that the markets which are performing well help mitigate losses from markets which are struggling. Conversely, this could also be seen as underperforming markets eating into the gains of strong markets. Though ultimately, diversification is a strategy used to reduce risk, rather than to increase returns. The aim is not to beat the global markets, but rather to match them.

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