Wealth Management
Money is an Enabler, Not A Goal.
At GDC International Limited, we focus on getting to know you first — your lifestyle, goals and values. Then, we will develop a long-term plan to achieve those goals. Combining the expertise of our advisers with technology and our self-developed proprietary tool, we will analyze your assets and expenditures. We will provide you with a comprehensive analysis of your situation, and potential scenarios which may impact your cashflow forecast.
Our advisers will be with you at every step of your new wealth plan, ensuring that you can make well-informed decisions in any situation, and achieve your goals in life.
Wealth Planning
From time to time, we will get this question about the way we manage wealth for our clients: “why should clients pay you an ongoing advisory fee if you take a “passive” instead of an “active” approach to investing?”
In the investment world, an active investment strategy is one whereby the investment managers will switch from one asset class/country/region/theme to another or pick securities based on short-term market forecasts to try to get higher than market returns (also known as alpha). This is as opposed to passive investment managers who buy a basket of securities that simply tracks an index and do not make frequent changes due to short-term views of the markets. In doing so, they will only get market returns. Because of the term passive, it seems to suggest that it is an inferior, lazy approach where there is nothing much being done once an investor invests and because passive managers do not give excess returns over the markets, there is no value added and perhaps one should just DIY and avoid paying extra fees to wealth advisers like us. But to debate on which is the better approach without first determining the type of clients we are investing for and what problems we are trying to solve for them is like putting the cart before the horse and therefore futile.
For GDC, our clients are primarily family stewards whose dominant focus is to take care of their families and they are conservative in their personal and professional lives. When they come to us, they want us to help them reach their non-negotiable life events (such as retirement) without compromising their shorter-term life goals (such as taking a one-year sabbatical to pursue a worthwhile cause with a non-profit organization). Therefore, they are not looking to maximize their investment returns but rather the reliability and sufficiency of the returns to meet their needs. To achieve that, the better approach would surely be based on evidence rather than trying to outguess the market.
In order to ensure that clients’ wealth plan can achieve their life events and goals with higher certainty. We need to work out the amount of funds and the suitable asset allocation that they should invest and stay invested in. Therefore, the future expected returns of the stock markets need to be properly estimated. Our model breaks down the overall equity returns into various components and examined the historical data and scrutinized each component in forward looking setting to come up with the final estimate. While it is an estimate, because it is scientifically developed, there is a basis for us to make adjustments, when necessary, throughout the lifetime of our clients because the markets are always changing. This process can hardly be described as passive.
While we know from evidence that staying invested for the long term is the most reliable way to get sufficient returns, we know that in the short run, there will be plenty of noise which will cause volatilities and in turn can cause investors to feel uncomfortable and sell out prematurely. If they do so, they will then not be able to capture the returns they need and possibly even lose capital. As such, besides doing proper cashflow planning before and in retirement for clients that is customized to their individual circumstances, we actively execute a turbulence management plan that includes investor education from the time clients are onboarded and throughout their lifetime and also a series of communication and handholding activities through market volatilities. As a result of our “active management”, we hardly had clients who panic sold in 2022 when markets were uncertain but instead added more money into their investments. This allowed them to capture the returns when markets started recovering since the beginning of 2023.
Through deep conversations with our advisers, you will gain clarity on what matters most in life and what needs to be done to live a good life, both financially and non-financially.