https://www.linkedin.com/in/privatewealthmanager (Darryl Tom) is a private wealth manager who delivers personalized comprehensive wealth management strategies and solutions to high-net-worth (HNW) individuals. Previously, he was a private banker at DBS and ANZ private banks and an investment manager with https://www.hsbc.com.au/ (HSBC Australia), providing investment portfolio construction across multi-asset classes, including unit trusts, ETFs, equities, global fixed income and currencies. He provided investment guidance to relationship managers to meet the investment needs of their clients.

Darryl has worked as a financial planner for https://www.amp.com.au/ (AMP), Australia’s largest wealth manager, and was also based in Tokyo, Japan, where he was a private wealth manager for a boutique wealth management firm catering to HNW expatriates and specializing in wealth management and asset protection. His experience includes business training and development for large multinational firms, such as https://www.goldmansachs.com/ (Goldman Sachs), Pictet Asset Management, https://www.baxter.com/ (Baxter), Roche and Microsoft.

“I come across a common theme across all of my clients, which I guess if you were to boil that down into a simple sentence, it would be that clients are chasing the market or following the market as opposed to following a strategy.”

Darryl Tom

No.1 mistake witnessed as a wealth manager Chasing the market rather than following a strategy Darryl has been on the front line talking with a lot of investors and people wanting to protect and grow their wealth for future generations and one of the common themes across all of his clients’ mistakes has been chasing or following the market as opposed to following a strategy. He says investing is a very disciplined and patient game.

Investors’ styles likened to The Tortoise and the Hare He also says investing is like the moral in Aesop’s: The Tortoise and the Hare fable. Consider the tortoise as being the slow, precise, and disciplined investor, just doing what he needs to do and staying the course. Meanwhile, the hare races ahead, but stops every five minutes to talk to people, responding to different information in the market, basically just being distracted. This is a common theme across most of his clients and as a private wealth manager, it’s his job to sit back and try to steer clients more onto the tortoise track as opposed to running with the hares. Following the market instead of following a clear strategy would be the overarching theme.

How to be the tortoise? Stay in your lane! Darryl asks his clients if they’ve ever been stuck in heavy traffic, trying to leave town on a long weekend Friday afternoon. He asks them to recall being stuck in the right lane while watching cars go by and feeling desperate to join them and get where they’re going. So they wait for a break in the traffic, pull out, do a few car lengths and the car in front slows down and they’re stuck again. Suddenly, while looking to the right, that lane starts to move forward. They do that two or three times, but if they had actually stayed in their lane, they would have gotten to their destination a lot sooner, and a lot more free of stress. He adds: “We’ve all done that”.

Industry and media often drives investors to be the hare The way the financial system operates and is structured and the way the media also markets the financial services industry does not really help investors or clients. They talk up this stock or this “hot buy”, or come up with plausible reasons for why the markets are going up or down, what people should buy and what they should sell. They try to excite, because if they were just saying: “Let’s put together a strategically allocated all-weather portfolio and just let it run its course,” that would make for pretty boring TV, Darryl says.

“(If the media were saying:) ‘Let’s put together a strategically-allocated, all-weather portfolio and just let it...