Monthly Portfolio Changes

In October, we made minimal changes across the centralised investment proposition. Within the ACUMEN Portfolios we adjusted our fx exposure by unwinding our Japanese yen currency overlay and a portion of our US dollar hedge. Within the protected portfolios we made one change to our equity allocation, switching our emerging market exposure to a new ETF that tracks the performance of the MSCI Emerging Market Low Carbon SRI Leaders index. This meets the strict criteria laid out in our ESG investment policy and has a larger allocation to China, in-keeping with our current investment outlook. Finally, we made several changes to our model portfolio service. Within fixed income we re-focused our existing investment grade corporate debt exposure into European names whilst in our ESG solution we switched out of short-dated US Treasuries into sustainable development bank bonds. In equities we rotated out of multifactor smart beta and into the MSCI World SRI ETF which provides exposure to companies with high ESG scores. Finally, we took partial profit on our allocation to gold producers and invested the proceeds into a broad-based index of commodities.