Investment bonds are designed to produce medium- to long-term capital growth, but can also be used to give you an income. They also include some life cover. There are other types of investment that have ‘bond’ in their name (such as guaranteed bonds, offshore bonds and corporate bonds) but these are very different. With an investment bond, you pay a lump sum to a life assurance company, and this is invested for you until you cash it in or die.
An investment trust is a company with a set number of shares. Unlike an open-ended investment fund, an investment trust is closed ended. This means there are a set number of shares available, which will remain the same no matter how many investors there are. This can have an impact on the price of the shares and the level of risk of the investment trust. Open-ended investment funds create and cancel units depending on the number of investors.
Unit trusts are collective investments that allow you to participate in a wider range of investments than can normally be achieved on your own with smaller sums of money. Pooling your money with others also reduces the risk.
Open-Ended Investment Companies (OEICs) are stock market–quoted collective investment schemes. Like investment trusts and unit trusts, they invest in a variety of assets to generate a return for investors. They share certain similarities with both investment trusts and unit trusts, but there are also key differences.
Open-ended investment funds are often called ‘collective investment schemes’ and are run by fund management companies.
Investing in funds provides a simple and effective method of diversification. Because your money is pooled together with that of other investors, each fund is large enough to diversify across hundreds and even thousands of individual companies and assets. A pooled (or collective) investment is a fund into which many people put their money, which is then invested in one or more asset classes by a fund manager.
Should you invest all of your money in one go or drip-feed it into the stock market over time? The answer will ultimately depend on whether you have a lump sum to invest or not, but it can have a big impact on your returns. Your decisions will invariably be based around your circumstances, attitude to risk and where you are investing your money and why.
Before you choose or make any investment decisions, you need to know that investing involves the possibility of loss. These key considerations help you become more confident about your investment decisions.
While diversification is important, you should keep in mind how much risk you are prepared to accept on your money. If it is important to you to avoid losses, you may want a portfolio that has less in shares and more in cash and fixed interest securities held to maturity, for example.
Diversification, the spreading of your money between different kinds of investments (‘asset classes’) and different kinds of investment product, helps reduce the risk of your overall investments (referred to as your ‘portfolio’) under-performing or losing money.
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