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Introduction to Investing

Chapter 10. Investment Strategies and Styles

SR Team - 21 August 2024

Investment Strategies and Styles

Understanding the different investment strategies and styles to choose from when starting your investment journey is a crucial step before building your portfolio. Picking the right strategy that aligns with your financial goals and risk tolerance will help you navigate the complex investing world. This chapter will explore a few of the most common investment strategies and styles, discussing their characteristics, benefits, and risks.

Active vs. Passive Investing

Active and passive investing are two of the overarching approaches to investing:

  • Active Investing: This involves actively managing a portfolio and making frequent trades to try and outperform the market. This approach requires significant time, effort, and expertise, as you must be more hands-on in selecting your investments.

  • Passive Investing: This involves adopting a buy-and-hold strategy and investing in a diversified portfolio of index funds or ETFs to track an index's performance rather than outperform it. This approach is less time-consuming and often less expensive than active investing, although it may have lower returns.

Value vs. Growth Investing

Value and growth investing are two popular investment styles:

  • Value Investing: This involves looking for undervalued companies with solid fundamentals and a strong track record in the hope that their share price will increase over time.

  • Growth Investing: This involves investing in companies with high growth potential, but requires a willingness to take on higher risk in pursuit of higher returns.

Income-Focused Strategies

Income-focused strategies are designed to generate regular income from investments:

  • Dividend Investing: This involves investing in companies with a history of paying consistent dividends, which provides a regular income stream and the potential for long-term capital appreciation.

  • Bond Ladders: This is a type of bond investing that involves holding bonds with staggered maturities to provide a regular income stream and help manage interest rate risk.

Tax-Efficient Investing

Tax-efficient investing involves minimising tax liabilities to maximise after-tax returns:

  • Tax-Loss Harvesting: This involves selling losing positions to offset gains from winning positions in order to help minimise tax liabilities and maximise after-tax returns.

  • Tax-Deferred Accounts: Accounts such as ISAs, SIPPs and traditional pensions allow investors to grow their investments tax-free, helping to minimise taxable gains.

Investor Psychology

It is important to understand the behavioural psychology that plays a role in investment decision-making:

  • Cognitive Biases: Cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias, which involves seeking out and preferring information that supports your preexisting beliefs, and loss aversion, where individuals experience losses more severely than they experience the equivalent gain, can lead to suboptimal investment decision-making. It is important to be aware of these biases in order to mitigate their impact on your investment approach.

  • Emotional Decision-Making: Making investment decisions driven by emotions, such as fear or greed, can lead to poor investment outcomes. Instead, it is important to develop a disciplined approach to investing that avoids emotional choices and stays focused on long-term goals.

Key Takeaways

By understanding the different investment strategies and styles most commonly used by investors, you can find the most suitable approach to implement when building your portfolio in line with your unique investment goals.

The next chapter will explore the importance of tax-efficient investing in more detail and discuss strategies for minimising tax liabilities and maximising after-tax returns.