Your guide to investing close to retirement

Well greetings everyone, my name is Tom Becket and I'm part of the investment team at Canaccord Wealth. I'm here today to talk to you and give you some advice on investing close to retirement. There's lots of advice I could give you but there are certainly two things which are most central in my view about investing close to retirement and they are: number one, don't panic and number two, don't overreact. This is absolutely vital.

You could be given lots of different advice but certainly I think that absolutely central to any thoughts about investing close to retirement is have a plan and stick to it. There might be a need to move your portfolio or change strategy to reflect the fact that your personal circumstances have changed, or you want to carry on investing or working for longer, but having a simple plan - understanding what you want to achieve - is absolutely key.

The next thing to note is that actually 10 years or even five years is a long time in financial markets and it could be a long time until you actually officially want to hang up your boots or stop logging into your work computer for the final time. So, you need to think about what specifics will be around your circumstances and how long it might be until that final point for retirement might come in the future.

But whether it's 10 years or five years, our view would be don't be gung-ho.  Keep to an asset allocation, think about what you want to achieve and try and achieve that. With that in mind, here's some thoughts about what you might do with certain time frames before you retire. The first one of which might be a decade. Now I can promise you a decade in financial markets is a very long time and you will need to change your portfolio around during that period. But the simple fact of the matter is if you look at the long run through financial market history, you'll know that making money over the long run is relatively simple.  I.E asset markets do tend to go up over time.  There are very few periods during history when you've seen a sustained fall of asset markets over 10-year periods.  Now this might happen in the future but that's not our central case, so if you have 10 years to go our view would be you should have a pro risk and a pro-growth strategy. Over that time period you'd expect risk-on assets to rise in value.

Now when it comes to a five-year investment strategy you might want to have less risk than you'd have for a 10-year strategy but again that will be dictated somewhat by what the opportunities and the risks are in financial markets. Notably right now, on a five-year forward-looking view, our views on asset classes are actually more positive than they've been for quite a long time. That's because in recent times we've seen a fall in asset prices and a rise in the income on offer from certain asset classes, not least fixed income. Fixed interest investments are more typical for an investment strategy if you're only five years out from a retirement situation because fixed income does provide more predictability than you might find from investing in equity investments, which tend to provide higher growth in the medium-to-long term which therefore might be more suitable for a 10-year long portfolio as you approach retirement. So, we would argue that the difference between a 10-year investment strategy and a five-year investment strategy might be the weighting towards equities which would be higher in a 10-year strategy and fixed income which would be higher in a five-year strategy.

But as I've said the good news right now is that there are lots of good opportunities out there for investors of any time period towards retirement.

There's also the need for realism, we have to recognise that your personal situations might change and this is where financial planning is a vital ingredient to your successful retirement. The simple fact of the matter is that if your pension is not meeting or won't meet your expectations then you might well need to stay invested in both your career and financial markets for longer.

So, what are the key tenets behind our advice that we can give you for a successful retirement. The first thing is absolutely set realistic goals. Don't just hit and hope, wild optimism is not going to help you towards a successful retirement. What we can do is sit down with you and help you set sensible and achievable retirement goals and then work with you to see how long it might take you to achieve them. We can also help you devise a near retirement investment strategy whether it's 10 years or five years or even closer. Then we can build for you an investment portfolio aimed at providing your desired retirement income.

The second point is absolutely vital, you have to find inflation protection. Inflation is the enemy of any investor but particularly for those who have retirement needs fast approaching. What we can do is we can help you understand how inflation could affect your investment strategy and try and ensure that you've got sufficient assets to last you for your retirement years. Again, inflation is like financial markets - it changes - and you need to think about that.

The third piece of advice linked to that is you've got to adapt your portfolio to changing market conditions. That's our specialty subject, we are investment experts, and we can help you put together a strategy to help you save for a retirement that will be able to meet your aims and expectations in the future. Yes, you need a long-term asset allocation, you need that plan that we referred to, and you must stick to the plan. But where we can help you is by overlaying that plan by monitoring the markets that we follow on your behalf and trying to adjust your portfolio to help you meet your aims and expectations. Finally, just don't overreact. We're here to help you with your investment strategy to make sure that we can avoid that overreacting that is very commonplace in markets to the short-term fluctuations that we see. We believe that when you put all these things together, they should be the necessary ingredients to hopefully a successful retirement in the future.

Thank you for your time, goodbye.