A senior financial planner with McPhail HLG Financial Planning, David Graham, is the winner of the 2015 BlackRock/PortfolioConstruction Forum Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA) scholarship for retail research analysts and consultants.
The scholarship, valued at about $7000, enables Graham to undertake the CIMA course – the core program of the Investment Management Consultants Association Australia (IMCA).
And while the CIMA program might traditionally have been seen as aimed at institutional analysts and portfolio managers, it has a high level of relevance for financial planners, says Graham (on the left in the picture, with James Langlands, BlackRock’s head of wealth advisory (retail)).
“It’s been more institutionally focused in the past, but from a planning perspective, I looked at a couple of different options … but this was, I think, more comprehensive over different asset classes and the process of building portfolios,” he says.
“It encompasses that, it encompasses behavioural finance and those sorts of things, so it’s comprehensive from a financial planner’s perspective.”
Improving investment offerings
Ongoing education is integral to staff development at McPhail HLG, and Graham says the knowledge gleaned from courses like CIMA helps to improve the firm’s investment offering to clients.
“I finished a Master of Applied Finance at the end of last year and I though, is that all there is? I thought I’d like to go on, and go a little deeper,” he says.
“It whetted my appetite to do something else, and the CIMA thing seemed like the way to go.”
In addition to holding a Master of Applied Finance degree, Graham is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) and an SMSF Specialist Adviser (SSA). He holds a Diploma of Financial Services and a Graduate Diploma of Financial Planning.
“There’s no end to learning, really; you don’t know what you don’t know until you go and find out,” Graham says.
“The more you’re exposed to things like risk, for example, the more you realise there’s more you can offer if you can go off and learn some more.”
Making processes more robust
Graham says McPhail HLG has been building its own portfolios since about 2008 and the CIMA program will help the firm make its processes more robust.
“We have a philosophy and this is building into that philosophy,” he says.
“Specifically, what we’re trying to do is do better for clients, at the end of the day. One of the areas I’m looking at at the moment is offering something that’s more an institutional quality offering to self-managed super funds.
“We know that during 2008 they came out and said we did better than retail offerings, but that was more the Steve Bradbury effect – everyone else had fallen over.
“What I see anecdotally, and there’s always exceptions to generalisations, is there’s a lot of people out there who really don’t know what they don’t know, investment-wise, and there’s a whole market out there I think needs help.”
Graham says the CIMA program’s focus on portfolio construction will “give us more confidence, being able to present something to clients that is robust, and I think it’s a matter of translating it into terms they can accept or understand”.
“If we can get into that space I think it makes the process more robust,” he says.
“I think everyone knows what should be done, but getting people to stick to that is the hard part. It all comes back to market psychology.”
Internationally recognised
The CIMA program is the only internationally recognised course in Australia that specifically addresses needs of investment consultants and research professionals.
The BlackRock/PortfolioConstruction Forum scholarship is offered to enable retail and multi-manager investment research analysts or consultants to participate in the CIMA Program.
A key element of the program is a residential course run over five days at the HC Coombs Centre for Financial Studies in Kirribilli, Sydney, in conjunction with the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and relevant industry practitioners. It runs from September 27 to October 2.
