An Overview of Colonial First State Investments

At Colonial First State we have been helping Australians with their investment, superannuation and retirement needs since 1988. The Investments team manages over $50 billion on behalf of Colonial First State’s investment, super and retirement customers, with the objective of improving the financial wellbeing of our customers and communities.

Our experienced team specialises in constructing and managing portfolios by selecting and combining multiple investment managers to deliver to the portfolio specific objectives. Investment managers bring specific characteristics to each portfolio. While the combination of managers is designed to deliver the portfolios overall risk and return.

Each investment option provides convenient and simple way to diversify your portfolio across asset classes, investment styles and securities by investing with a range of investment managers, many of whom are only available to institutional investors.

With 8 Multi-Manager Multi-Sector, 15 Multi-Manager Single Sector, 6 Multi-Index and 8 Index options on offer, it’s easy to find a solution that matches your approach to investing.

So how do we do this? Our investment philosophy is the starting point and is based on 5 beliefs.

• Active management can generate outperformance.
• Growth assets will outperform defensive assets over the long term.
• Tactical asset allocation isn't a reliable source of additional return for multi-sector portfolios.
• Combining managers with different styles and processes can deliver more consistent outperformance than investing with one manager.
• And finally illiquid assets can compromise portfolio construction.

Next we construct portfolios based on our investment philosophy. The process:

• Determines the portfolio’s investment objective which includes the appropriate benchmark and investment timeframe to guide investors as to which investment options suits their needs.
• We then construct the investment portfolio to deliver to the objective by selecting the asset classes and appropriate investment managers in each asset class.

Each investment manager we appoint is subject to extensive initial investment and operational due diligence and ongoing monitoring to ensure they continue to be appropriate for the portfolios.
We want to do the hard work in reviewing and monitoring investment managers to allow you to focus on other things.

Our process is further strengthened by our long term relationship with Mercer, an investment consultant who provides specialist investment advice, research and investment tools.

We also have an extensive research program in place that allows our team to identify new ideas for the portfolios from both investment managers we know well and investment managers we are getting to know better. This year alone the team has met nearly 600 Investment Managers from around the globe.

Once the investment options are in place we continue our robust monitoring through a portfolio optimisation process which has three stages:

• Firstly constant monitoring of both incumbent managers and those in the wider universe.
• Secondly development. Do we need to make incremental portfolio changes to enhance outcomes for investors?
• And thirdly evolution. Do we need to make significant changes to ensure portfolios remain relevant to investors?
  
  

At Colonial First State our goal is to make it easy for you to ensure your portfolio continues to meet your investment objectives. Whether you're investing within super for income and retirement, or to achieve a specific financial goal, we aim to have a robust investment solution for you.