NZ Funds Investment Report 1H 2020

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NZ Funds is one of the few wealth management institutions to have taken a generation of New Zealanders through retirement. In our early days, as managers of Lion Nathan’s pension fund (then known as LD Nathan), we helped employers accumulate savings through a workplace programme. Three decades later, many of those original clients are still with NZ Funds, regularly drawing down on their capital to fund their retirements.

Along the way they have been joined by many more New Zealanders who were seeking a resilient, advised portfolio service. Our role is to help them accumulate enough to be financially independent, and then manage those funds in retirement and for the generations to come. Our early LD Nathan employees are now in their seventies, eighties and in some cases nineties. It is a privilege to manage their wealth during periods of financial market volatility, such as now with COVID-19.

As a large and stable wealth management organisation, with an average client tenure of over 12.5 years in our retirement portfolios, we have had many deep and meaningful conversations with our clients over the last 32 years. In those conversations we have often reflected on the similarities between health and wealth. Small positive actions taken over many decades, whether that is exercising regularly or saving regularly, snowball over time to have a meaningfully positive impact.

As is the case with health care, when people are young and everything is going well, they may see little value in working with a specialist, particularly if there is a cost associated with it. But when there is an “emergency” those who have access to expert medical or financial advice are likely to do better than those who take a do-it-yourself approach to either health or wealth. We believe 2020 will prove to be an excellent example of the benefits of working with a financial adviser and an organisation whose Directors and Principals (and many of its employees) have managed clients savings through three previous market downturns. Over the last three decades we have had ample time to design and test a disciplined approach to navigating market downturns. And that is what we have implemented on clients' behalf this year.


Please read the full report below.

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