The Wealth Club is launching a discretionary fund management service and discretionary share portfolio.
The new DFM will be targeted at high net worth individuals and sophisticated investors, and will launch next year.
Wealth Club’s chief executive, Alex Davies, told FTAdviser the firm is launching the DFM to rationalise investors’ portfolios.
“I – like many other investors – have loads of different funds I have bought over the years, often because they featured on some best-buy list or were ‘flavour of the month’ funds at the time,” he said.
“After 20 plus years, you probably end up with a collection of investments that individually make sense, but you are not quite sure how they fit together and almost certainly don’t add up to a well-constructed investment portfolio.”
The service will aim to solve this by putting the investor’s holdings into a suitable model portfolio.
It will be completely online and will have a “significantly lower cost” than conventional portfolio management services.
It will offer exposure to Oeics, investment trusts and ETFs as well as private market funds from blue chip fund managers.
The access to private markets makes the product stand out in comparison to its competitors, Davies said.
“Private markets – and private equity in particular – have been the most compelling investment themes of the past decade, but to date they’ve also been the exclusive preserve of institutions and family offices.
“To get that as part of a discretionary portfolio should be really attractive.”
The portfolio will be managed by Jonathan Moyes, currently head of investment research at the firm. He was previously at Whitechurch Securities in the same role, where he managed £400m of discretionary portfolios.
Discretionary Share Portfolio
The group is also planning to launch a discretionary share portfolio which will invest in around 15 to 20 firms.
“There will be no constraints in terms of geography or market cap,” Davies said, adding the manager will take a very long term view.
The manager of the portfolio has been appointed and will join in April next year, but cannot yet be named.
The Wealth Club is an online investment service for high-net worth individuals and sophisticated investors that launched in February 2016.
It currently has 42,000 members who receive regular investment information, as well as 7,400 investors through the firm’s platform that offers exposure to tax-efficient investments.
The group is also the largest VCT broker with a 19 per cent market share.
Davies spent 15 years at Hargreaves Lansdown, most recently as a director.
sally.hickey@ft.com
