At 8AM we recently asked advisers who recommend our services for feedback and were delighted to receive positive feedback on all aspects of our adviser offering.
Just one of the quotes was that we offer “Excellent service & performance, with low fees & great investment process”.
Our team is made up of a diverse group of experienced industry professionals. By leveraging expertise in investment management, financial advice, product design, data control and analysis, adviser tool development, and exceptional client service, we offer advisers Model Portfolio Services designed from the ground up to meet the unique needs of their clients. Let’s meet some of the team.
Ash Weston is Head of MPS at 8AM Global and he is passionate about everything MPS – We asked him to introduce himself.
I’m driven to find the most efficient way to achieve any task in business and in life (ask my wife for full details).
MPS itself isn’t a perfect framework, but its increased uptake represents a clear overall improvement in investor outcomes over the last decade. When building investment strategies you are often torn between the two extremes of the potential for big returns, higher drawdowns and an increased risk of ruin versus creating something completely benign and relatively risk-free but with less chance of significant underperformance.
Usually, you’ll end up building something which sits somewhere between the two extremes and is by definition ‘not perfect’ but aligned with the needs of the investor in question.
MPS is much like this – rather than being ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other framework, it is simply more aligned with the needs of investors in 2025 than many of the historic means of managing client multi-asset portfolios. MPS is better equipped to allow advisers and clients to engage positively with their portfolios, by nature of increased transparency and the lower cost of implementation means that (on average) investors charging is fairer and clearer.
What attracts IFAs to the AQ methodology?
Designed ‘by IFA’s for IFA’s’ was a motif I was passionate about when we started promoting the strategy – as more and more time passes since I had my own clients, I don’t know how long I can continue to make the claim. In practice, I believe the strategy fundamentally makes sense and is easily explainable at almost any level of detail. Experienced advisers know that there are no free lunches and significant, consistent outperformance is a statistical anomaly. The logical trade off of ‘neutral+’ portfolio allocation reduces the chances of significant short term underperformance and an unbiased and clean fund monitoring system allows us to add consistent alpha over the longer term.
As an adviser, I dreaded the phone calls and emails during periods of market volatility. Our goal with AQ was to attempt to reduce those periods of stress to (hopefully) near zero and to build towards the most efficient way to build client wealth over the long term.
“If something doesn’t add value, client engagement, context or understanding – we don’t do it”
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