What you need to know about asset allocation

Asset allocation is one of the most important things to get right for investing success.

But what does it mean, how do you do it, and how do you then also profit from opportunities of the moment?

Fidelity International’s Bill McQuaker joins us on the Investing Show to explain the essentials. As a multi-asset manager, it’s his job to build portfolios containing shares, bonds, property, commodities and other assets that balance risk and reward but can also profit from the best opportunities available at any given time.

We ask him how people can decide what sort of investor they are and evaluate the risk that they are willing to take, and to explain asset allocation and how these two aspects fit together.

Bill also tackles the tricky problem of how to deal with bonds, which are traditionally considered a safe and defensive investment but by historic standards are very expensive right now.

In the first part of the show, Simon Lambert, of This is Money, Richard Hunter, of Wilson King Investment Management, and Nick Batsford of TipTV, look at the IPO revival in the US and whether we will now see more flotations in the UK, the commodity rebound, and some bad news for pagers.