Getting ready for the tide to go out
Charity investors are offered two ways of investing: a discretionary manager who buys and sells shares directly for their client; or through an investment fund, usually called something like ‘Charity Income and Growth Fund’ and which have risk appetites varying from cautious all the way through to adventurous.
The former (discretionary) approach requires the manager to carry out a suitability test so they understand each charity’s financial status, its need for income and its capacity to withstand capital losses. This includes looking across all the charity’s assets and liabilities. With a single investment fund it is not possible to do this. The manager cannot tailor the fund profile to the needs of each individual investor – it is a single product designed to have a specific risk profile.
A charity will commonly seek to invest in a ‘medium risk’ fund. However, the fund manager is only regulated to make sure the fund itself is ‘medium risk’ which means that the client, if they have other assets, may well have a completely different risk profile. If, for example, they hold property the overall risk the charity is taking might better be described as ‘adventurous’ rather than ‘medium risk’.
What should Trustees do? Trustees must remember that investing in a fund that is ‘low risk’ only describes that single fund. It certainly does not describe the charity’s total investment risk if it holds any other assets outside the fund. That’s why it is so important for trustees to understand the risks they are taking in the round and not simply to assume that labels on individual investment products apply to their entire charity.
Regulations don’t allow firms that offer products to consider the risks of the other assets and liabilities of the charity, only the risk of the funds they offer. That’s why independent advice is so important for any Trustee body that is not confident in making these decisions about their total risk.
After ten years of very good stock market returns, we hope that all Trustees will find that they are properly covered when the tide does finally go out