We offer fully managed investment portfolios within your pensions and ISAs, which in turn invest in very low cost passive index trackers to replicate the global market exposure and weightings required (or not) to fit within your attitude to risk/reward. This is best described as an Active:Passive approach and we consider this offers the very best of both worlds:

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All the benefit of active management at an asset allocation level and all the benefits of low cost passive underlying investments.

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We offer 5 different levels of risk/reward or, alternatively, 2 different target date portfolios that will blend through appropriate levels of risk/reward over the years based upon your end requirement (drawing down income at your target date, or withdrawing a lump sum at your target date).

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The total annual cost is an all inclusive 0.87% a year with a one-off 1.5% transaction charge.

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Below we compare this approach with the two main alternatives to running your investments (DIY Platforms and Financial Advice) together with a comparison of our Active:Passive investment style to simply active or passive investing.

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DIY platforms are very popular with individuals who do not want to pay for financial advice. Essentially you pay the platform provider a fee to access its platform and select your own investments from a list of thousands.

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The downside is that you are responsible for selecting an asset allocation model and the underlying investments that map to this, then running the ongoing monitoring and rebalancing of this.

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In reality however, most people just select popular funds based upon past performance and do not asses the asset allocation and underlying investments their fund options create, which can lead to poor investment outcomes and taking the wrong level of risk/reward.

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The typical costs with the UK's largest DIY platform provider is 0.45% a year plus fund costs. The fund costs can be as little as 0.2% for purely passive investments (see below) or as much as 1.6% for fully managed funds (again, see below) giving a total cost of between 0.65% at base level up to 2% a year.

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Intelligent Money Private Clients gives you a fully managed portfolio for an all inclusive 0.87%, so so we can do everything for you at a significantly lower cost of you doing everything yourself.

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Financial advice generally takes the same shape as above, except it is your advisers responsibility to address the suitability of the investments you hold (something they remain liable for).

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This obviously does add an additional layer of costs onto those quoted above for DIY platform investing, typically 3% to 4% upfront and another 1% a year, bringing the total costs up to 1.6% to 3% a year.

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This compares to our Private Client service's all inclusive charge of 0.87% a year and has no advice fees as it is a non-advised service.

This is when both your asset allocation and your underlying investments are completely computer managed.

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Your exposure to different markets and assets is completely dictated by their global rank/weighting.

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It is certainly the lowest cost option, but means that risk/reward is only crudely addressed by an increase or decrease of equity/bond exposure (which you have to constantly address yourself).

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There is no human team allocating assets based upon your requirements and no ability to do anything other than blindly track markets regardless of any other factors.

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Our Private Client service does not have this important limitation, as all weightings across each individual global assets class and market sector are fully managed.

This is when you pick a particular fund, usually based upon its current popularity and/or past performance, to meet your future needs.

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The fund manager has displayed a good performance record in selecting stocks. You (or your adviser) believe this will continue.

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It may. But statistically it will not. This approach does not really consider asset allocation (which, statistically, is the proven driver of investment returns).

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The final point here is one not usually mentioned. Liquidity.

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One of the most popular actively managed funds at the moment has well over £20bn of client money invested into just over 26 companies. It therefore only has 7 day liquidity of 62%.

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These very heavy positions in a very small number of companies can therefore create serious potential problems. Any large sale could push the shares down massively.

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A complete exit could involve watching your investments plummet whilst this happened.

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Our Private Client service does not carry this risk. We only invest in funds that have 100% daily liquidity, so could move to cash/gilts/gold the same day if needed.