Trustnet Magazine Issue 33 October 2017 | Page 10

YOUR PORTFOLIO / REINVESTING / Investors need to think carefully about how to reinvest the proceeds of any assets they sell if they want to avoid going back to square one, writes Emily Perryman D ECIDING WHEN TO SELL FUNDS OR EQUITIES CAN BE TRICKY, but so too is figuring out what to do with the cash received from these investments. In many instances the sale of an asset can skew the risk weighting of a portfolio, meaning it no longer matches the investor’s appetite and capacity for risk. Adrian Lowcock, investment director at Architas, says this will usually happen if the investment made up a large proportion of the portfolio and/or was at the extremes of the risk scale – either very high or low risk. “The more extreme it is, the more significant the impact will be,” he explains. The simplest way to return a portfolio back to its original risk weighting is to buy an investment with exposure to the same asset class, region, industry and strategy. But changes may also need to be made elsewhere in the portfolio to reflect the fact that each investment could have performed differently over time. If a fund has risen strongly in comparison with the rest of the portfolio, its weighting will have increased. Lowcock suggests a good starting point is to determine the asset allocation model from which the original portfolio was built. “This will need to be fairly detailed, covering all the major global equity asset classes and exposure to smaller companies. An asset allocation model doesn’t reflect the changes of the riskiness of each asset class but will help you to identify where the profits have appeared and trim your exposure to those areas,” he says. THE SUBSTITUTE 8 trustnetdirect.com trustnetdirect.com 9