Offshore Investment Opportunities
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Written by tolumi
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Friday, 05 December 2008 15:11 |
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Offshore Investment OpportunitiesPredicting future trends is a risky but necessary investment process. Michael Wilson finds out where our panel of advisers will be placing their money October has always been an interesting month for investors and this one is shaping up nicely. As the first firm autumn trading figures reach the markets, after the long phoney wars of the summer, analysts and advisers get their first opportunity to take a good hard look at where the world is really heading now that the fund managers are back at their desks and the politicians are back on their benches. October is often the month when economists suddenly notice some major imbalance that they’ve been quietly ignoring since the spring - an overvaluation of the yen, perhaps, or an undervaluation of bonds, or a looming shortfall in oil reserves. That’s when the markets go into hyperdrive with some ill-considered over-reaction and we get the kind of panicky situation that’s so often spoilt the party for investors who aren’t on their guard. Offshore Investment Opportunities - International PanelSo it’s especially good to find that this time our international panel of financial advisers is in a quietly confident mood. Yes, they’ve been telling us, there are uncertainties on the world stage at the moment - a sharp rise in oil prices, a lot of European noise about the euro and a US presidential election just around the corner - but on the whole the world seems to be moving along well enough from an investor’s point of view. The US economy is still chugging along nicely, the technology sector is heading back in the right direction after its troubled summer and the recent wobbles in the euro have been addressed by some fast and decisive action from the European Central Bank. Japan’s new prime minister seems to be settling into the job reasonably well, and even Russia’s President Vladimir Putin appears to have survived the political disasters of the last two months - though he might not find things so easy this winter. Offshore Investment Opportunities - advisersOur advisers have been quick to remind us, of course, that they don’t speak for the stock-pickers and short-termists. Most of them focus on the long-term business of insurance-related investments, including pensions and so their portfolios tend to be made up almost exclusively from holdings in wholesale funds provided by other fund managers. This, in turn, means that short-term stock-hopping would actually be against their clients’ interests, because the additional administrative costs of making too many trades would kill the performance of their portfolios. It’s essential to hold onto the long-term view. The biggest area of disagreement in our panel seems to centre on the continental European markets, especially in the wake of Denmark’s recent referendum vote against joining the single European currency. A fairly clear dividing line quickly became apparent between those advisers who fancied the underlying strengths of the Eurozone economies and those who felt that the future still lies with the US. Offshore Investment Opportunities & Graham ReidGraham Reid, director of the Brussels-based Classic Financial Solutions, leads the pro-euro camp. Many of Classic’s customers are UK expatriates who have moved to continental Europe for periods of three to five years, usually in the course of their employment, and they tend to be heavily committed to the euro (although he believes that his non-resident investors are just as happy with the new currency). He says that, on the whole, they are investing for the medium term and that many are thinking of retiring in the Eurozone. So they tend to take the ups and downs of the troubled currency in their stride. At present, he’s advising his clients to put a minimum 70 per cent of their money into euro-denominated investments, and if things improve, the ratio may rise as high as 80 per cent. Dollars will normally make up most of the rest. 
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 06 January 2009 14:15 |
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