Grange St. Paul’s Hotel, 10 Godliman Street, London, EC4V 5AJ

6.15pm for 6.30 start, 7.30 finish

Format
A small group of interested individuals (often including spouses) around a table, the content substantive and provocative, more education than sales, more conversation than lecture, with further opportunity for discussion and drinks after a prompt finish.

Speakers and subject
In this seminar, Stuart Fowler, who was a leading innovator in the management of institutional investments before founding No Monkey Business, will explain how and why private client advice and portfolio management is not fit for purpose. The consequences of this are most critical for retirees who will be drawing down their own resources to meet their spending in retirement and depending on the products and services the industry can offer.

No Monkey Business financial planning head, Joe Clark, will take you through an approach designed specifically for this purpose, based on the outcomes driven (or liability driven) investment techniques that have already overturned the traditional approach to occupational pension management. Adopting these techniques in private wealth management has been endorsed by academics but also by the professionals that work in private wealth firms.

Stuart and Joe will help you to visualise how different the experience can be when you work with the best techniques, delivered by smart people who are totally on your side.

Benefits of attending this seminar

• Powerful insights into the essential principles of drawing down from capital (whether in a pension account or other forms) when subject to particular constraints, such as competition from other financial goals; maintaining purchasing power; sustaining the rate of draw through bad markets; control and flexibility
• This should encourage you to think about your own needs in a different light and how they could be best met
• An opportunity for you to meet a firm that is successfully challenging the banking, stockbroking, tied agencies and IFA businesses who currently work with professional people.

Who attends
We invite people like our existing clients: high earning professionals that appreciate smart thinking, elegant engineering and who expect a professional approach to charging.

We hope to meet you at one of these seminars or by other arrangement. Places are limited so if you would like to attend please respond promptly by email joseph@nomonkeybusiness.co.uk or click here.

Wednesday 3^rd March 2010

Grange St. Paul’s Hotel, 10 Godliman Street, London, EC4V 5AJ

6.15pm for 6.30 start, 7.30 finish

‘What I hoped for but better than I dared expect’ is how a top City lawyer recently described a No Monkey Business financial plan.

How are private clients supposed to know what they are going to get with services as complex, technical and opaque as financial planning and portfolio management?

In our seminar series on retirement planning over the last year we tried to ensure attendees left better-informed, engaged and intrigued but not just sold to. That comes at the expense of clear expectations of what it would be like to be a client of No Monkey Business. In this seminar we focus less on education and more on the experience and exactly what you would get.

Attendees will:

• Understand why our clients have more confidence about their financial future
• See why they consider us to be their ‘trusted adviser’
• Learn why most new clients see their overall costs drop significantly
• Be able to make comparisons with their existing advisers of suitability, service, cost and value
• Dare to expect more

In this seminar we will describe both elements of a possible relationship with No Monkey Business, planning and managing:

‘Initial Review’

• Scope: all or any aspects of individual or wider family finances that you define
• Structure: four stages on an agreed time line – discovery, development, decisions, deployment
• Outputs: a structure of different financial goals, with specified resources assigned, approaches to risk management and (if retained) quantified probable outcomes; clear definition of how you expect to derive benefits from your wealth (applying ‘utility’ theory) and how the goal structure maximises utility, using more or less familiar concepts such as total capital (or balance sheet) efficiency, cost effectiveness and tax minimisation
• Value: if you have never experienced personal financial planning at the level of professionalism of, say, strategic business consulting, institutional investment consulting or corporate and government economic analysis, you have nothing directly to compare our analysis and reports with; this should be one of the best investments you make
• Conditions: you get value from a plan independent of hiring us to manage money and you do not need to know whether you will retain us; the scope may be limited to focused areas of advice with no intention to retain us.

‘Continuous Investment Services’

• Scope: discretionary or advisory portfolio management based on goal plans developed in an Initial Review; we need plans because we use a rigorous, quantitative process of client-specific and goal-specific portfolios managed uniquely to deliver a plan
• Outcomes: each portfolio has explicit outcomes that tie in with the agreed resource allocation and risk approach – hence outcomes-based investing or, as it is known in the institutional market, ‘liability driven investing’ (LDI); outcomes are delivered subject to a risk management discipline that relies on dilution of risky assets by risk free assets
• Relationship: you deal with a skilled team, not an ‘account manager’ or sales person
• Reporting: quarterly reports consolidating total assets as well as goal-specific portfolios; reprojected model runs for each goal to provide forward progress as well as comparisons with benchmarks; outcomes-based planning and reporting fundamentally alters the way portfolio management is experienced
• Cost: flat fee based on scope not asset value; combined with low implementation costs, for clients with portfolio assets above £1m we are likely to be saving them money; depending on assets, assume 0.3 to 1.5% to cover all costs
• Value: at all levels of wealth, our economic value is a function of both total costs relative to expected portfolio returns and ‘soft’ benefits experienced, such as clarity and confidence

To accept our invitation please contact Joseph Clark, on 020 7736 2434, email him at joseph@nomonkeybusiness.co.uk or click here.

(Please note this is only open to Olswang Partners)

In this workshop, the Olswang Partners will gain a better understanding of pensions;

• As part of retirement planning
• Which is itself part of lifetime risk management and capital efficiency planning
• Covering all assets, all of your life
• Which can promise better outcomes for lifetime consumption and bequests
• And ensures you do not make mistakes in the snake pit of HMG’s ‘simplified pensions’ regime

Key factors to focus on when accumulating wealth

• Embrace capital market risk but avoid inflation risk
• Keep costs as low as possible
• Pay most for the things that most impact outcomes
• Make the best use of pension and other ‘wrappers’ as holding vehicles to maximise flexibility and expected after-tax outcomes
• Well before you start decumulation, plan how you intend to convert capital to an income stream so you really do ‘derisk’ instead of just swapping risks.

What will the partners get from this session?

1. Early warning of suboptimal actions or omissions
2. Insights into what they are paying and getting from our industry
3. Enjoyment of engaging in a vital dimension of their lives, without being too serious!
4. A sense of what it would be like to be advised by us

1st December (London) and the 3rd December (Manchester)

Liability-Driven Investment (LDI) is transforming decision making in the occupational pensions market. Applying the same outcome-driven thinking to personal financial goals provides powerful insights into asset allocation and risk management for both financial planners and portfolio managers.

• For ‘liabilities’ read ‘tolerable planning outcomes’
• Outcomes as describable, quantifiable, date-stamped and real
• Risk management as combining matching (risk free) and tightly-managed mismatching (risky assets)
• Redefining the asset opportunity set
• Calculating the asset return probabilities
• Turning it into a dynamic process
• The benefits for clients, planners and managers

Details of the conference and how to reserve a place can be found within the programme of events.

Grange St. Paul’s Hotel, 10 Godliman Street, London, EC4V 5AJ

6.15pm for 6.30 start, 7.30 finish

Much conventional advice about pensions is incomplete, flawed and even conflicted. It leads to confusion, poor choices and worse outcomes. Smart pension thinking, by contrast:

• sees pensions as just part of a retirement spending plan
• uses pension maths to reveal pension myths
• seeks true optimal application of complex pension and tax rules
• knows exactly how similar problems are being solved in the occupational pension world
• uses modeling techniques that are designed to deal with multiple sources of uncertainty
• applies ideas of ‘personal utility’ to help make better choices with confidence.

Our Invitation

In the latest of our retirement seminar series we draw together some powerful insights that will improve financial outcomes in a complex area where even intelligent people make mistakes. Even if you attended one of the earlier ones, you will get value from coming again. The format is the same but the venue is new. We promise a prompt start and finish but the opportunity afterwards to discuss over drinks.

Five earlier small, educational seminars in three different venues in the City over the last 12 months have defined the funding of retirement spending, as an economic challenge, and then looked at how conventional planning and investment solutions fail to measure up to the challenge. Not surprisingly, because we are selling as well as educating, we also demonstrate how our approach, which integrates the planning and the investment management, is much more plausible as a means of delivering both better outcomes and better experience of the journey.

In this seminar, we pick out the key penny-drop moments from the previous seminars: insights about the problem, the existing solutions or our solution, that stand on their own as financially valuable or will send you home thinking differently.

We can’t guarantee the penny will drop for you but if you look at what other people have said on our website you will maybe sense this is not marketing hype. It works for us too. A high proportion of the attendees have gone on to commission an Initial Review, almost all of which have already led on to a Defined Outcome Portfolio management role.

Here’s what No Monkey Business founder, Stuart Fowler, and I will discuss this evening:

How doing the pension maths exposes some pension myths

• Why you were probably badly advised to bias savings to pension products
• How low contributions should go to avoid the Lifetime Allowance trap
• Why vesting early and taking tax free cash often makes sense
• When triggering Primary Protection is better than running Enhanced Protection

Seeing pensions as part of an ‘implementation’ strategy in an overall retirement funding goal

• It pays to understanding the industry jargon of ‘wrapper strategy’
• What decisions optimise the strategy: combining asset allocation, tax, liquidity and costs
• What to do if you have already been sold a suboptimal strategy

Why private wealth management approaches the investment problem differently from institutions

• Insights from Liability Driven Investment: the leading edge of asset management solutions
• Defining the matching (or hedging) asset for funding retirement spending targets (or liabilities)
• Noting the wealth-destruction record of ‘money illusion’
• Planning a risk budget using tolerable ranges of uncertain, real, date-stamped spending outcomes
• How we can afford to provide complete customisation of dynamic investment plans

Personal ‘utility’: more insights from applying established theories to household finance

• Defining how you measure and value the attributes and benefits of wealth, in your terms
• Why it makes your decision making engaging, simpler, more transparent, better
• How we translate that into inputs to a specific technical solution, in our terms
• Why better decisions by you and us are likely to lead to better outcomes.

To accept our invitation please contact Joseph Clark, on 020 7736 2434, email him at joseph@nomonkeybusiness.co.uk or click here.