Happy New Year! This note provides a look back at 2024 - a year where markets have been particularly kind - and looks ahead to 2025 and beyond, including some important reminders for investors.

In this short note, we cover this simple, but important, concept and illustrate how the Rule of 72 can be used to help consider the impacts of compounding (we rely on such simply rules of thumb because compounding is something we are not, as human beings, wired to process easily!).

Another four years have flown by, and at the time of writing, here we are again, on the morning of the 60th U.S. presidential election. As the results unfold, media coverage will undoubtedly intensify, but the message to the long term investor will stay the same: presidents may come and go, yet markets endure. We hope you find this note useful to remind you to stay focused on the long term.

With around 50% of the global population living in countries with elections this year, the market has a lot of noise and expectation to price in over 2024 and beyond. Ultimately, whether it is the conservatives or labour that are at the wheel (which has been the case for the last century or so), capital markets persist and have delivered fantastic long-term value to investors. Correctly guessing the outcome of an election is only the starting point, knowing how the market will interpret that is guesswork. The most important thing we can all do is vote!

This note on how an Investment Committee works hard behind the scenes to make sure that client portfolios continue to remain robustly structured and likely to provide clients with the greatest chance of a successful investment journey. Often - after much analysis and discussion - that may mean making no changes. It uses the analogy of a duck looking serene above the surface of the water (the client portfolio) but paddling hard below the surface to stay where it wants to (the Investment Committee).

Happy New Year! This note is our now regular piece 'Looking backwards and forwards', which provides an overview of how major asset classes have performed in 2023, and trying to place 2024 in perspective. We compare 2023 to 2022 as well as providing 3-year cumulative asset class returns which are strongly positive in aggregate. Despite the troubles and uncertainties in the world, there are some pretty wonderful pieces of evidence of the world's collective progress in many areas, which help act as a counterbalance to the doom and gloom that overwhelms the daily news. We hope you find it of interest.