Are your taking advantage of the best investments sourced globally?
Cashel House actively manages capital, asset allocation and investment selection to protect and grow your generational wealth.
When you invest with a family office, you invest alongside and on the same terms as each of our families and staff. We are invested together in our collective success.
As a client of Cashel House you invest alongside our staff, friends and family. Together we are aligned to protect and grow wealth for generations.
As a family office our first focus is capital management. To protect what you have, ensure you can access it when you need it, and ensure that you can track the performance if it without confusion or interference.
Our second focus is, when appropriate and when all risks are considered, is to put your capital to work. To leverage our size of client numbers, our individual strengths and collective networks to find, evaluate, negotiate, and then to invest and manage your capital for long term gains throughout every cycle.
As a commercial family office we access global investment markets, we compare investment opportunities from over 40 different stock exchanges, over 4,000 different opportunities annually including listed companies, private equity, direct real estate, various funds managers, multiple cash options and special situations.
All too often people limit their investments to their local neighborhood, or one asset class, or to a product created by the “house”. This creates an unnecessary risks to wealth protection, and limits predictable higher growing and better yielding investment opportunities.
As a globally focused investment manager we bring this discipline of keeping a long-term perspective, maintaining diversification, and protecting you from changing circumstances.
To do this we follow a disciplined approach. That approach includes:
- Understanding your families reason for investing
- Investing using the right legal structures
- Documenting the investment strategy
- Setting liquidity thresholds
- Dynamically managing asset allocation selection through changing cycles
- Investing alongside and with specialist investment managers and business executives with sustainable and a predictable track record of out performance within each asset allocation, and
- Ongoing active capital management (moving in and out of markets as risks increase or decrease)
1. Understanding your families reasons for investing
Each family and their family members are unique, their needs and objectives are unique, as are their interests and comfort with different investment classes. Before we can recommend an investment strategy that matches your needs we must understand fully your personal circumstances, experience and interests.
2. Investing using the right legal structures
Selecting the right investment is important, however investing using the right structures is critical. Within Australia you may invest in your own name, through a company, trust or self managed super fund.
- Each has a different tax treatment around long term capital gains (and losses) and short term trading gains (and losses).
- Each has different direct and indirect tax implications based on the asset class being purchased. For example real estate and securities may have different direct and indirect taxes based on the holding entity being used.
- Each has different asset protection capabilities that should be considered especially in the case of private equity investments where as a vendor of an asset you may need to provider warranties that you can’t limit through insurance.
Cashel House is a tax and capital protection aware investment manager. Net after tax retained gains are more important than headline gross returns.
3. Documenting your investment strategy
As part of our investment mandate we will document your reason for investments and objectives. We will do this via way of a Statement of Advice and update it regularly through a Record of Advice.
In our annual review as required under the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) legislation we will review our performance compared to the investment mandate and vary this as needed in order to better meet your investment objectives.
4. Setting liquidity thresholds
When we invest we are mindful of the liquidity profile of each client.
Liquidity at the portfolio level needs to be mindful of the following:
- Investing in a long term growth opportunity using short term cash reserves can equally cause the investment to fail, just as much as poor management or poor business practices does within the investment itself.
- When we construct your asset allocation we must be mindful of what liquidity your lifestyle needs in the next 6 to 12 months, and what liquidity you may need should the unexpected occur (and you don’t have appropriate insurances to deal with it).
Liquidity within the portfolio needs to also be considered:
- For example we consider the risk of not being able to capture a paper profit. If there is no ability to sell or the position is too large and the trading volumes too low this can lead to a gain not being captured. As such investment position sizing is very important.
5. Dynamically managing asset allocation through changing cycles
With our global custody platform partner we are not limited in the asset classes or investments we can make. In the same vein we do not create generic investment models that are only updated annually or shewed towards investments products that we have an underlying interest in.
Cashel House’s investment managers actively review over 4,000 direct investments and managed funds annually to identify investments that will where possible protect capital and grow it. However prior to doing this we take a global in order to frame our thinking. This process includes:
- Selecting Preferred Investment themes. Before any investments are selected it is critical to select themes that will put you in good standing to weather any short term volatility and capture long term gains. Investment themes can include investing in capital defensive, high to modest liquidity assets and those with strong tail winds in population growth, technology, food and resource scarcity, housing and selective consumption.
- Select Preferred Sectors. To access these themes Cashel House will select resilient and solid demand sectors that access the preferred investment themes.
6. Selecting and sizing the predictable and proven investments within each asset class
Within each asset class we strive to select the best opportunities based on a number of metrics, these include (but are not limited to):
- Investing with strong management (and investment managers) that we have known for a long time, and whose actions are predictable
- Understandable business models which create tangible measurable value
- Capital light and high cash conversion
- Sustainable competitive advantage
- Have operational leverage that can be expanded through capital and marketing investment
- Attractive stock valuations metrics
- Into securities that real. No synthetics, repackaged or derivatives that have unnecessary costs or legal risks.
These screens means that we invest through the following:
- internally managed separately managed accounts, and
- external specialist investment managers, and
- direct public and private equity holdings that we would deem to be special situations.
Examples of investment managers that we use include the following:
7. Ongoing Active Capital Management
Whether you are a Family Office or a Superannuation client (or both) your Cashel House Financial Planner will work with our portfolio managers to maintain daily Capital Management, Asset Allocation and Security Selection within you individual portfolio. These includes reviewing if your capital should be invested or not, what weightings you have per asset class and what investments sit within each asset class.
Both asset allocation and security selection of very important, but it should not be comprised by the larger picture of capital allocation. Capital allocation is the big picture management of your investments in riskless or risky investments, in other words you investment in government guarantees cash deposits, or investments that poss some level of growth and capital loss. Cashel House is forever focused on managing capital by way of withdrawing capital in periods of valuation and direction uncertainty, and applying it in times of opportunity and trend based confidence. Our objective in doing this, is to protect capital ahead of downturns and to grow capital in times of market expansion.
Book your free personal appointment with a Cashel House investment specialist.
Please fill in the form and we will be in contact to discuss your investment needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Personal assets are those best described as lifestyle assets, such as your primary place of recidence, motor vehicle or holiday home.
- Market assets are those assets that are invested in market assets that rise and fall with markets generally, and
- Aspirational assets are those that you are likely in full or partial control of, such as your business. They typically have much higher levels of risk and hopefully higher levels of return.
- Cash
- Term Deposits
- Real Estate
- Australian and International Managed Funds
- Australian and International Shares
- Hedge Funds, Private Equity and Special Situations.
The allocation to each will depend on your risk profile, experience, liquidity needs and personal interests.
A separately managed account is an investment mandate that enables Cashel House to invest in direct shares, but to actively manage them without interruption to you for each re-balance, exit and new investment. This enables you to hold shares directly in your name, without the additional costs of a fund manager.
Cashel House operates 3 discrete separately managed account strategies:
- Cashel Special Situations
- Cashel Private Portfolio
- Cashel Global Special Investments.
Through its partnership with Bank of New York Mellon, Cashel House can buy and sell shares just like a stock broker. However unlike a stock broker Cashel House is engaged by you to protect and grow your wealth, rather than to actively buy and sell shares to generate a brokerage fee.
Cashel House is an active investment manager. We seek to constantly review your investment portfolio, the investments and investment themes it is invested in, and the proportion of investments versus cash that you may hold at any time. It is this last difference that makes Cashel House an active investment manager. In times of confidence we seek to invest in growing markets, in times of weakness and uncertainty we seek to reduce investment positions and hold funds in cash accounts while markets reduce. Because of this Cashel House can be more costly.
Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) are investment strategies that invest in specific exchanges or sectors. At all time they must be invested in the investment strategy specific to its mandate. Because of this, each time they receive further funds they need to invest it in their investment strategy regardless of whether the markets are expensive or not. While ETF can be cheaper, they can often lead to lower returns than an active asset manager.
Your assets are held safely either within a custody account with J.P. Morgan (one of the 3 largest custodian banks in the world), or in a securities account with Bank of New York Mellon (the largest custodian bank in the world).
Through one of Cashel House’s audited platforms overseen by third party trustee’s and with global custody arrangements.