The questions we are usually asked.

Independent. It has a defined meaning in the rules we are authorised under: our advice is not restricted to any provider’s products, and we consider the whole of the relevant market rather than a panel of it. A firm that cannot say that has to describe itself as restricted instead. In practice it shows up in what we have no reason to recommend — there is no in-house fund range here that needs feeding, and no provider whose products we are expected to place.

Yes. Long Row Wealth Advisory Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, firm reference number 978338, and you can check that on the FCA register. We are registered in England and Wales, company number 10556587.

Francois van der Merwe, who founded the firm and does both the advice and the investment work. He is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and holds the Level 4 Diploma in Regulated Financial Planning. You are not handed on to someone else once you become a client.

South Oxfordshire. We advise UK-resident individuals, families and smaller companies, mainly across Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley, though being nearby is not a requirement.

Your portfolio is not held by this firm. It sits on a separate regulated platform in your name, and you have direct access to it throughout — so if I were no longer able to advise you, you could act on the holdings yourself or appoint another adviser in my place. Nothing in the arrangement leaves your money dependent on this firm continuing.

Two kinds of fee. Substantial pieces of advice — a retirement plan, a business exit, an inheritance tax strategy — carry a one-off fee we quote before the work starts, with no implementation or front-load fees on top. Ongoing service is charged as a percentage of the investments we advise on, and the rate steps down as they grow. Your own fee, one-off and ongoing, is set out and agreed with you in writing before anything is charged.

No. Advice firms handle the investment side in one of three ways and all three are legitimate: keep it simple with index trackers or a single multi-asset fund, buy the portfolio in from a discretionary manager, or research and build it in-house. Only the bought-in route adds a layer of charge, because the outside manager’s fee sits alongside the adviser’s own. We do the investment work ourselves, so it is covered by the one ongoing fee rather than charged beside it.

Five things. Ongoing investment advice and monitoring, so your portfolio keeps pace with the current LRWA models. An annual review meeting to go through your circumstances and the portfolio, and to check the plan is still suitable for you. A quarterly report on how the portfolio has performed. Access for ad-hoc questions and concerns in between. And where a major tax or regulatory change lands mid-year, we come to you rather than waiting for the annual review.

No. We are not VAT registered, so our fees carry no VAT.

No. An initial call about your situation and what you want to achieve carries no obligation and no fee.

When there is a decision with money attached that you would rather not get wrong. In practice that is usually one of four things: capital to invest, a retirement to plan for, an inheritance tax problem to deal with, or wealth you want to pass to the next generation intact.

As a general rule we look for at least £300,000 of investments under our ongoing advice, counted across a household rather than per person — so where there are two of you, the holdings are added together. It is a general rule rather than a hard line. The thinking behind it is arithmetic: the research, the portfolio construction, the reviews and the reporting cost much the same whatever the size of the portfolio, so below a certain point the percentage needed to cover that work stops being good value for the person paying it.

Get in touch anyway if you are serious about investing. The figure is a general rule about where our ongoing service starts to earn its keep, not a barrier, and where you are heading matters more than where you are today. Capital arriving, a business you expect to sell, pensions that will come together into something substantial — all of that is worth a conversation now rather than later.

Yes. We will normally look at whether consolidating legacy pensions makes sense, and any current workplace pension is taken into account as part of the plan even where it stays where it is.

Through a range of five model portfolios, each typically holding more than twelve funds or investment vehicles, and every one of them a vehicle the Financial Conduct Authority classes as suitable for retail investors. The portfolios differ from one another in one respect only: how much volatility — how much the value swings about, up and down — each is built to carry. The value of investments and the income from them can fall as well as rise and you may get back less than you originally invested.

Because it means every client gets the same thinking at the same time — we do not keep our best ideas for a favoured few. Which model we recommend depends on what the money is for, when you will need it, and how much movement you can live with in the meantime.

The conventional portfolio rests on two things: shares to generate the returns and high-grade bonds to steady them. It is a sound long-term strategy and we would not argue otherwise. Its weakness is structural — with only two real sources of diversification, returns are dominated by what those two markets do, and they sometimes fall together, as they did through the inflation shock of 2022. We draw returns from a much wider range of sources, aiming for attractive long-term returns with less movement along the way.

Because the cheap option does not reach the places we most want to be. An index tracker is an excellent way to own a mainstream market, and we would not argue with anyone who says most stock market exposure can be bought that way for very little. But the strategies that behave differently from shares and bonds — which is the whole point of what we do — generally have no index to track. Someone has to run them, and a specialist manager costs more than a tracker does. So the test we apply is a net one: a strategy earns its place only if, after every charge — the manager’s, ours and the platform’s — we judge the return it is likely to add still worth having, and still genuinely diversifying.

Not usually, no. Beating a mainstream index is not what most of the managers we choose are there to do. We use them because they invest in a way that does not simply follow the stock market up and down — so that when shares have a bad year, not everything in the portfolio is having the same year. Where we do want plain exposure to a mainstream market, a tracker is often the sensible way to buy it. Judging a diversifying strategy by whether it beat global shares last year is judging it by the wrong measure. The question we ask of it is whether it did the job we hired it for.

Yes. All investment carries risk — to earn more than a bank deposit pays, you have to take some. We would rather set out where the risks sit than imply there are none. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.