The Purposeful Wealth Podcast

Readers of the Sunday papers’ financial pages will be familiar with the dividend chasing stories that pundits and some fund managers love to peddle.
These generally focus on high dividend paying shares or ‘income’ funds that focus on these shares.
The thought that one can take an income from a portfolio without the need to sell shares can feel appealing to some. But dig a little deeper and it quickly becomes evident that a ...

For many investors a propensity to place too much weight on recent events in terms of what the future may look like is quite common. This is known a ‘recency bias’ and it is this, we regards as the scourge of investors.

Charles Schwab, a major US broker, sponsored some research on its own client base to identify which behavioural biases predominate in their clients and recency bias was the one most commonly exhibited.
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Isn't it true that modern society loves a ‘star rating’?

Most of us know what to expect if we book a 5-star hotel stay for a business trip when compared to a 3-star bed-and-breakfast for a weekend away.

The investment field is no different, with many institutions offering their own spin on star ratings and how to calculate them.

However, unlike the hotel industry, I would suggest many of the rating s...

Are Balanced Portfolios dead?

Legend has it that in 1895 whilst in London, Mark Twain, who had been feeling a little poorly, on discovering that a journalist had written his obituary, quipped the following:
‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated’.
In the past few years, obituaries for a traditional ‘balanced’ portfolio of, say, 60% equity, 40% bonds have been written by quite a number of financial journalists and f...

In today's episode, we're going to consider the subject being a formula for success. But before we look at, that, thank you again to all of our listeners who tune into the Purposeful Wealth podcast. I've made apologies before that the recordings haven't been maybe as frequent as we would have liked, and the library hasn't been updated. That's just largely been due to the other competing factors, such a...

Welcome to The Purposeful Wealth Podcast and this episode on how a systematic approach to investing provides the best chance of experiencing a successful investing journey - 'Don’t just take our word for it!'

Sticking to some key guiding principles – which are grounded in evidence and logic – gives investors a solid foundation on which to build a sensible investment solution. This short note provides an insight i...

So, today's topic on looking at home bias and global diversification. I think it's fair to say that every day we enjoy the benefits of an interconnected world. We may well start our day with, a cup of coffee that originated in South America. We check our email on our smartphone, which has been designed in California and manufactured in Taiwan, and then we dress and clothes woven from Egyptian fabrics before driving our Am...

Unfortunately we now live in a world of fake news and ‘alternative facts’ where parties shamelessly push their own agenda and narrative at the cost of salient facts.

In order to be heard in the noise of social media, research headlines need to be bigger and more eye-catching.

For those investors using an evidence-based approach that means it is important to make sure that any evidence being reviewed is based on tr...

The saying, “The market hates uncertainty” has been a common enough in recent years, but how logical is it?
There are certainly many different aspects to uncertainty, some that can be measured and some that cannot.
Uncertainty is quite simply an unchangeable condition of our existence.
As individuals, we can feel more or less uncertain, but that is a distinctly human phenomenon.
Rather than ebbing and flowing with i...

A new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has claimed pensions are treated more generously by the tax system as a vehicle for inheritance than for retirement income. The IFS said that keeping savings in a pension tax wrapper can be a highly effective way of avoiding inheritance tax, and this is an anomaly that needs to be addressed. Their new “Death and Taxes and Pensions” study was funded by the Financial Fairness T...

 Hopefully, this headline will not come as a surprise to you. It is remarkable, though, just how relaxed some investors are about letting others dip their hands in their pockets to extract high fees. The problem has two root causes. The first is that in most walks of life, paying higher costs should help you to secure the best lawyer, architect or builder, yet when it comes to investing this relationship breaks down. The second is ...

If all you had to go by was the information presented in the financial media, you’d be forgiven for believing that to be a successful investor you needed to know which companies were best to own, and that you had to be able to forecast market cycles, predicting the tops and bottoms, which no one can. Fortunately, to enjoy a successful investment experience, either of these are true. 
At Wells Gibson, we believe that the most im...

Partial Transcript

In part-1 we considered the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance and in particular the simple and effective ways to reduce tax via the annual pension and ISA allowances... Philanthropy makes it possible to reduce your liability to higher-rate or additional-rate tax by giving more to charity, an area we will consider more when the Purposeful Wealth podcast considers the subject of Giving.... F...

Welcome to the Purposeful Wealth Podcast

Partial Transcript:

Benjamin Franklin once said, "But in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes." I'm sure you would agree...albeit there are other certainties I can think of! Not paying more tax than you need to is sensible in order to create and preserve wealth. Strategies will include utilising allowances, exemptions and tax pl...

Welcome to the Purposeful Wealth Podcast.

Partial Transcript:

At the start of 2022 investors needed reminding that investing is not an easy game, despite having enjoyed around a decade of relatively strong – and fairly consistent - market returns, even in light of a global pandemic, recession, and political polarisation. The year 2022 laid bare the fact that investing can very much be a game of ‘three steps forwar...