Defensive Investing

Protect your money when markets are unstable

Working with SEI, we’ve built four portfolios – tailored to key investment goals

It’s highly likely that investing for growth will form at least part of your lifetime financial plan. We’ve chosen SEI as our partner to manage these portfolios to help you meet your goals.

This allows us to add more value to our relationship with you than just managing your portfolio– like insights from world-leading analysts, regular webinars with the team managing your money, and access to exclusive investments in niche markets that you wouldn’t normally be able to access. Just as importantly, we work in partnership, with a shared focus on the real-world reasons why you invest.

On this page, we’ll introduce you to the four growth portfolios we’ve built together – each one aimed at a different growth objective – as well as our options for defensive investing in the short term.

As ever, your Financial Planner will work hard to find the perfect blend for you.

Defensive investing for short-term protection

Alongside our growth strategies, we offer a defensive investment portfolio with SEI. It’s designed to reduce short-term ups and downs and protect your money when markets are unstable.

This approach may suit you if:


  • You plan to use your money in the next 12–18 months

  • You’re unsure when you’ll need access to your funds

  • You’ve already reached your financial goals and want to take less risk


Want to know if it’s right for you? Just get in touch with your Financial Planner—we’ll help you figure out the best fit.

Ocean Marina in Southampton

Four ways to meet your growth objectives

Our main growth strategies with SEI takes four different approaches – cautious, balanced, growth, or aggressive.

As the names suggest, these offer increasing levels of investment risk and projected reward. They’re all fully active solutions, with continual intervention from expert fund managers. Importantly, they’re all well diversified, global approaches, too – protecting you against volatility in sectors and markets. And, even in the cautious approach, they’re all focused on growth.

The difference is in the proportion of your money that’s invested in different kinds of assets. The lower risk profiles use more government gilts and corporate bonds, also known as fixed interest, where the faster-growing approaches rely more on equities like stocks in new tech companies and emerging markets. Our videos above explain more about what equities and fixed interest is.

What are equities?

Gain a deeper understanding of equities and how they can fit into your overall investment strategy

What is fixed income?

How fixed income works, it’s benefits and how it can fit into your overall investment strategy

Low-cost and bespoke growth investments

While we’ve designed our FCFP portfolios to cover most financial goals, they won’t suit everyone – so your Financial Planner has more growth options to call on. For example, if cost is an issue we have index tracker funds overseen by Schroders. And we can also provide access to specialist discretionary fund managers and ethical and sustainable investments.

What’s important to us is finding the right fit for you.

Two companies – one focus. You.

We’ve found SEI’s emphasis on behavioural finance and goals-based investing is a great fit for the way we help you map out your lifetime financial plan.

In the finance industry, SEI is also one of the biggest, most trusted names behind the scenes – managing more than £300 billion in assets. We also appreciate the way we can work together as partners for our clients, so we know your voice is always heard.

SEI takes an innovative ’manager of managers’ approach, choosing specific investment styles for different contexts. It looks past a fund’s performance, to understand how those results were achieved.

Your introduction to SEI

Managing £300bn in assets, SEI might be one of the biggest investment companies you’ve never heard of. But size is far from the only reason we work together.

A joint focus your goals

Working together, we’ve tailored our goals, horizons, and investment decisions to suit FCFP clients like you. That shared vision keeps you at the centre.

The benefit of experience

How should we respond when the market is volatile, to get the best results? Let’s look at our four risk levels in more detail – and the benefits of staying calm.

Questions about our growth funds?

If you’d like to know more about how we choose and manage our growth and defensive investment portfolios, we’re always happy to chat.

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