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The Government has announced a range of measures to assist businesses in dealing with the financial impact of COVID-19.  We have outlined below the various support packages available. We will be in touch when details of how to apply for the various packages become available.

HELP FOR THE SELF EMPLOYED

The scheme is called the Coronavirus Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (CSEISS).

If you have suffered a loss in income, a taxable grant will be paid to the self-employed or partnerships, worth 80% of profits up to a cap of £2,500 per month.

Initially, this will be available for three months in one lump-sum payment and will start to be paid from the beginning of June.

You cannot apply for this scheme yet. HMRC will contact you if you are eligible for the scheme and invite you to apply online.

Government advice: Individuals do not need to contact HMRC now and doing so could delay the work being undertaken to introduce the scheme.

Who is eligible?

Self-employed individuals and a those who are a member of a partnership. In addition, those eligible must have more than half their income from being self-employed and:

• have submitted your Income Tax Self-Assessment tax return for the tax year 2018-19
• traded in the tax year 2019-20
• are trading when you apply, or would be except for COVID-19
• intend to continue to trade in the tax year 2020-21
• have lost trading/partnership trading profits due to COVID-19

Your self-employed trading profits must also be less than £50,000 and more than half of your income come from self-employment. This is determined by at least one of the following conditions being true:

• having trading profits/partnership trading profits in 2018-19 of less than £50,000 and these profits constitute more than half of your total taxable income
• having average trading profits in 2016-17, 2017-18, and 2018-19 of less than £50,000 and these profits constitute more than half of your average taxable income in the same period

If you started trading between 2016-19, HMRC will only use those years for which you filed a Self-Assessment tax return.

There a few individuals who have not submitted their 2018-19 Self-Assessment tax return and to qualify they now have until the 23 April 2020 to do so.

CORONAVIRUS JOB RETENTION SCHEME

Under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, all UK employers will be able to access support to continue paying part of their employees’ salary for those employees that would otherwise have been laid off during this crisis. All UK businesses are eligible.

Eligibility

You will need to:

• designate affected employees as ‘furloughed workers,’ and notify your employees of this change – changing the status of employees remains subject to existing employment law and, depending on the employment contract, may be subject to negotiation
• submit information to HMRC about the employees that have been furloughed and their earnings through a new online portal (HMRC will set out further details on the information required)

HMRC will reimburse 80% of furloughed workers wage costs, up to a cap of £2,500 per month.

HMRC are working urgently to set up a system for reimbursement. Existing systems are not set up to facilitate payments to employers.

RATES  HOLIDAY

The Northern Ireland Executive has committed to providing a three month rates holiday to all businesses from April to June.

BUSINESS SUPPORT GRANT SCHEMES

The Executive announced last week a grant of £10,000 to be provided to all small businesses who are eligible for the Small Business Rate Relief Scheme and a grant of £25,000 to be provided to companies in the hospitality, tourism and retail sectors with a ratable value from £15,000 up to £51,000.

Together these schemes will provide circa £370m of assistance to some of the most vulnerable businesses by helping their immediate cash flow pressures.

Economy Minister Diane Dodds announced the first set of payments for small businesses impacted by the Coronavirus crisis will be made under the Small Business Grant Scheme on 31 March, if not before then.

An online portal: https://www.covid-19smallbusinessgrants.economy-ni.gov.uk/

has gone live for businesses to register their bank and rates details to secure payment.

Payments of the £10,000 grant will be available in cash to 27,000 small businesses including those in receipt of the Small Business Grants Scheme. An additional 4,000 businesses in the tourism, hospitality and retail sectors will receive £25,000 in cash if they have a ratable value of between £15,001 and £51,000.

DEFERRING VAT AND INCOME TAX PAYMENTS

The Government will support businesses by deferring Valued Added Tax (VAT) payments for 3 months. If you’re self-employed, Income Tax payments due in July 2020 under the Self-Assessment system will be deferred to January 2021.

VAT

For VAT, the deferral will apply from 20 March 2020 until 30 June 2020.  All UK businesses are eligible. If you cannot pay remember to cancel your Direct Debit.

How to access the scheme

This is an automatic offer with no applications required. Businesses will not need to make a VAT payment during this period. Taxpayers will be given until the end of the 2020 to 2021 tax year to pay any liabilities that have accumulated during the deferral period. VAT refunds and reclaims will be paid by the government as normal.

INCOME TAX

For Income Tax Self-Assessment, payments due on the 31^st July 2020 will be deferred until the 31^st January 2021.

If you are self-employed you are eligible. This is an automatic offer with no applications required.

No penalties or interest for late payment will be charged in the deferral period.

HMRC have also scaled up their Time to Pay offer to all firms and individuals who are in temporary financial distress as a result of Covid-19 and have outstanding tax liabilities.

SUPPORT FOR BUSINESSES WHO ARE PAYING SICK PAY TO EMPLOYEES

The Government will make legislation to allow small and medium-sized businesses and employers to reclaim Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) paid for sickness absence due to COVID-19.

The eligibility criteria for the scheme will be as follows:

• this refund will cover up to 2 weeks’ SSP per eligible employee who has been off work because of COVID-19
• employers with fewer than 250 employees will be eligible – the size of an employer will be determined by the number of people they employed as of 28^th February 2020
• employers will be able to reclaim expenditure for any employee who has claimed SSP (according to the new eligibility criteria) as a result of COVID-19
• employers should maintain records of staff absences and payments of SSP, but employees will not need to provide a GP fit note.
• eligible period for the scheme will commence the day after the regulations on the extension of SSP to those staying at home comes into force
• the government will work with employers over the coming months to set up the repayment mechanism for employers as soon as possible.

You are eligible for the scheme if your business is UK based and your business is a small or medium-sized and employs fewer than 250 employees as of 28^th February 2020.

THE CORONAVIRUS BUSINESS INTERRUPTION LOAN SCHEME

A new temporary Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme, delivered by the British Business Bank, will launch this week to support primarily small and medium-sized businesses to access bank lending and overdrafts.

The government will provide lenders with a guarantee of 80% on each loan (subject to a per-lender cap on claims) to give lenders further confidence in continuing to provide finance to SMEs. The government will not charge businesses or banks for this guarantee, and the Scheme will support loans of up to £5 million in value.

Businesses can access the first 12 months of that finance interest free, as government will cover the first 12 months of interest payments.

You are eligible for the scheme if:

• your business is UK based, with turnover of no more than £45 million per year
• your business meets the other British Business Bank eligibility criteria

How to access the scheme

The full rules of the Scheme and the list of accredited lenders is available on the British Business Bank website: https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/ourpartners/coronavirus-business-interruption-loan-scheme-cbils/

All the major banks will offer the Scheme once it has launched. There are 40 accredited providers in all.

You should talk to your bank or finance provider (not the British Business Bank) as soon as possible and discuss your business plan with them. This will help your finance provider to act quickly once the Scheme has launched. If you have an existing loan with monthly repayments you may want to ask for a repayment holiday to help with cash flow.

The scheme will be available from early week commencing 23^rd March.

SUPPORT FOR BUSINESSES PAYING TAX: TIME TO PAY SERVICE

All businesses and self-employed people in financial distress, and with outstanding tax liabilities, may be eligible to receive support with their tax affairs through HMRC’s Time to Pay service.

These arrangements are agreed on a case-by-case basis and are tailored to individual circumstances and liabilities. You are eligible if your business pays tax to the UK government and has outstanding tax liabilities.

If you have missed a tax payment or you might miss your next payment due to COVID-19, please call HMRC’s dedicated helpline: 0800 0159 559. If you’re worried about a future payment, please call them nearer the time.

Humans have a hard time being investors.  Normally, we like to purchase things when they are cheap and avoid them when they are expensive, but that is often not the case for equities.  We tend to get overly optimistic and enthusiastic when equity markets rise dramatically, as they have done since the Global Financial Crisis a decade ago.  Yet when markets fall materially, we feel bruised and cautious, seeking to hang onto our stable bonds and even selling equities to avoid further falls in portfolio value.  That’s rarely a good idea, especially if you do not need the bulk of your capital in the foreseeable future.

As a client you will know that we have always sought to rebalance your portfolio on a regular basis, by which we mean returning it to the original target allocation that we initially established with you.  Most often, over the past few years, rebalancing has meant selling growth assets (equity-like) and buying defensive assets (bonds) in a contrarian manner.  This has helped to avoid the portfolio becoming dominated, over time, by the riskier growth assets component of the portfolio and to keep you within your emotional tolerance for falls, your financial capacity to weather them and your need to take risk in the first place.

Logically, the reverse also applies; at times like these the proportion of equities in your portfolio will have fallen below their long-term target.  This matters because your portfolio now has too little risk and it will be harder for the growth assets remaining to recoup the falls in value when markets eventually recover.

We can work that idea through with a simple example.  Imagine you own a £10,000 portfolio split 50% (£5,000) into growth assets and 50% into defensive assets.  In the growth assets portion, you own 50 units of a global equity fund priced at £100 per unit.  Growth assets fall by 40%.  Let’s assume your defensive assets are unchanged in value.  You still own 50 global equity fund units, but they are now priced at £60.  Your growth-defensive split has moved from 50/50 to 37.5/62.5.  Time to rebalance.

Figure 1: Market falls leave you underweight growth assets

Source: Albion Strategic Consulting

Rebalancing i.e. buying equities to realign the portfolio with its allocation target, helps to ensure a quicker recovery back to where you started.  This is because the breakeven price of your equity holdings is now lower.

So, let’s now assume that you rebalance by taking £1,000 from your defensive assets and buying growth assets to get you back to a 50/50 split (left hand grid below).  You can buy 16.7 units at £60 with the £1,000 raised.  To get your portfolio back to its starting value of £10,000 your now 66.7 global equity units need to rise 50% to £90 per unit (middle grid).  However, an un-rebalanced portfolio (right hand grid) only rises to £9,500 with this 50% rise.  In fact, to get back to a portfolio value of £10,000 and un-rebalanced portfolio requires a rise of 67% in the global equity units to £100.

Figure 2: Rebalancing helps the portfolio to recover faster 

Source: Albion Strategic Consulting

Even if the markets fall again after rebalancing, the opportunity exists to rebalance again, likewise further reducing the rate of return required to get back to where you were compared to un-rebalanced portfolios.  That takes courage and discipline, when your emotions are telling you to do the opposite.

The issue of a potential rebalance on the back of large market falls is certainly being considered and don’t be surprised if we raise this with you.  You now know why.  Remember, if you are drawing an income from your portfolio, withdrawing from bonds can get you closer to your target.  Likewise, if you have incoming cashflows, this too can be used to buy growth assets.

As David Swensen, CIO of Yale University’s Endowment and one of the world’s most highly respected institutional investors states^[1]:

‘The fundamental purpose of rebalancing lies in controlling risk, not enhancing returns.  Rebalancing trades keep portfolios at long-term policy targets by reversing deviations resulting from asset class performance differentials.  Disciplined rebalancing activity requires a strong stomach and serious staying power.’

Do you really need to rebalance?  The answer for most investors is likely to be ‘yes’ when the time comes.  If we feel a rebalance is necessary, we will be in touch to discuss this with you.

As ever, please feel free to give us a call if you have any questions.

Risk Warnings

This article is distributed for educational purposes and should not be considered investment advice or an offer of any security for sale. This article contains the opinions of the author but not necessarily the Firm and does not represent a recommendation of any particular security, strategy or investment product.  Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but is not guaranteed.

Past performance is not indicative of future results and no representation is made that the stated results will be replicated.

Errors and omissions excepted.

[1]    Swensen, D., (2000) Pioneering Portfolio Management.  New York: The Free Press

Context is an important tool when it comes to investing.  All investors around the world will be feeling the emotional pressures of the recent rapid equity market falls, either because they can remember previous falls and times of uncertainty, such as the Global Financial Crisis (2007-2009), or as younger investors, they have not yet experienced material market falls.  We obviously do not have a crystal ball to see into the future, but the global equity market falls we have seen since January – of under 20% or so at the time of writing – sit well within previous falls since 1970. In terms of expected ranges of outcomes, we generally estimate that 95% of the time annual equity market returns should sit within an approximate range of +45% to -35%.  Outliers do exist beyond these limits.

Figure 1: Today’s falls still sit well within both history and expectations (1/1/1979 to 18/03/20)

Data: Global equities – MSCI World Index (net div.) TR in GBP Morningstar Direct © All rights reserved.

The Table below provides numbers around both the depth and recovery times for each of the five largest falls since 1970 in the figure above.

Table 1: Declines and recoveries of global equity markets (1/1/1970 to 18/3/2020)

Data: Global equities – MSCI World Index (net div.) TR in GBP Morningstar Direct © All rights reserved.

How deep or long the current fall will be, no-one knows.  There will certainly be more rises and falls to come.  Yet we should take some comfort from the fact that things have been just as challenging at times in the past, albeit for very different reasons.  Recovery times sit well within the investment timeframes of most investors.  It is worth noting that an investor in global equites today has, in nominal terms, more money than they did at the end of April 2018, despite the market falls in late 2018 and those recently experienced.

These are tough times for all of us and for our Nation, but the words of wisdom that we always return to at these times are those of the legendary investor John Bogle:

‘This too shall pass’.

It will.

From an investment perspective the key message is to be brave and disciplined as a fall only becomes a loss if you sell. Remember, we are always available to take your call or answer your emails.  Please feel free to contact us if you have any specific questions or simply if you would like some reassurance.

Risk Warnings

This article is distributed for educational purposes and should not be considered investment advice or an offer of any security for sale. This article contains the opinions of the author but not necessarily the Firm and does not represent a recommendation of any particular security, strategy or investment product.  Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but is not guaranteed.

Past performance is not indicative of future results and no representation is made that the stated results will be replicated.

Errors and omissions excepted.

We are delighted to announce that, as of October 2019, Pacem and Redrock Financial have combined our businesses to provide our clients with a coordinated range of financial planning, taxation and accountancy services. Daniel Glover, Managing Director of Pacem, explained “our shared values and commitment to a client-focussed service have made this partnership possible and we are delighted to be joining forces with Lyn, Alison and the rest of the team. It is an exciting time for our business and our clients.”

Pictured are Directors Tony Glover, Alison Bell, Lyn McMaster and Daniel Glover.

Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve!

It is human nature to look at an investment that has done particularly well and wish you had been invested in it. We all risk being dragged into ‘if only’ mind games: ‘If only I had put a £10,000 into Amazon in 2003, I’d be retired by now’[1].  ‘If only I had bought Bitcoin at £1…’. These thoughts are dangerous to investors, as this fear of missing out (FOMO) can tempt them into taking speculative risks, often based on a rear-view mirror perspective. Concentrated risks have concentrated outcomes, both good and bad.

We have a lot of respect for the fund manager Neil Woodford, but anyone reading the news lately will have seen that his concentrated, high conviction, long-term strategy takes a lot of living with, which few investors seem to have the stomach for.  His fund, which peaked at above £10 billion, has less than £4bn in it today and the doors are currently closed to new money and withdrawals. Concentration risks are real.

A powerful insight into the dangers of owning a concentrated portfolio can be found in a piece of research on the US market from 1927 to 2015[2]. Of the 26,000 companies that have been listed on the US exchanges, only 36 made it through the whole period. The total wealth of $32 trillion generated over the period was entirely accounted for by just 4% of companies.  The market as whole – the good and bad in aggregate – delivered an annualised return of nearly 7% after inflation p.a. i.e. investors doubled their money roughly every 11 years, over this period.  That’s a pretty good outcome and a direct consequence of being diversified.

The difficulties of trying to time markets or to pick companies, sectors or managers, in the face of little evidence that professional investors have persistent skill in these fields suggests that a rational investor should eschew such approaches and seek to place their investment eggs across a wide range of baskets.

Diversification is ‘always having to say you are sorry’

The challenge with owning a diversified portfolio is that sometimes investors fail to look at the big picture, diving into the detail of their portfolio valuation to pick out the fund that is not performing well, and possibly moaning about it.  Underperformance does not mean that it is a bad fund or a bad strategy or a bad manager, particularly when systematic, low cost funds are used in the portfolio to capture market returns.  It just means that some markets (or parts of markets) are zigging while others are zagging – the very essence of diversification!

A diversified portfolio is not always easy to live with, as there will always be something you don’t own that is doing better than the portfolio and always something in the portfolio that is doing poorly.  So, if your adviser has to say they are sorry sometimes about an underperforming fund always remember that a) they are not responsible for market returns and b) they are acting in your best interests by making you remain diversified and stick with the programme.

[1]  In 2003 Amazon’s stock price fell as low as $7 per share.  At the time of writing, the share price is over $1775

[2] Bessembinder, H., (2017) Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills? WP Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.

Other notes and risk warnings

Risk warnings

This article is distributed for educational purposes only and must not be considered to be investment advice or an offer of any security for sale. The reference to any products is made only to make educational points and must, in no circumstances, be deemed to be any form of product recommendation.

This article contains the opinions of the author but not necessarily Pacem Glover and does not represent a recommendation of any particular security, strategy or investment product.  Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but is not guaranteed.

Past performance is not indicative of future results and no representation is made that the stated results will be replicated.

Errors and omissions excepted.