Three Sixty Financial Inc.

What a night! 🥂

A big thank you to everyone who joined us in for Safer, Smarter Investing: A Workshop for the Curious but Cautious.

Hosted by DOMINION and our own Kal Murray and Gary Cane it was all about real conversations with skyline views and some seriously good canapés!

We covered how to build long-term wealth with more confidence and less stress, even when markets are unpredictable.

Dominion shared practical investing strategies that aim to protect progress while still giving growth potential. One standout takeaway: some portfolios can lock in up to 80% of their highest-ever value, helping reduce the impact of sharp market drops.

We also heard from Justin Moorhouse of The Tax Man UK, who shared his UK tax expertise for anyone living overseas who has UK tax ties such as rental property, pensions, or inheritance considerations.

Highlights of the night included:

✔ How to get started or jump back in without overcommitting

✔ Why consistency is key to long-term results

✔ Practical ways to stay invested and avoid panic decisions

If you'd like to take a look at the slides or talk through the key ideas, just drop us a message.

Had a brilliant night at the KL Tigers Annual Rugby Ball over the weekend.

Jim Hamilton brought his trademark energy and had the room fully amused with equal parts insight and entertainment (no surprise there). The ball signing added a real buzz to the evening and became a great talking point throughout.

What stood out most though was seeing just how much the KL Tigers community has grown. There’s real momentum behind it - and with four teams now competing in international leagues, it’s exciting to see where things are headed.

Huge credit to the organisers and everyone who makes this community what it is. Proud to be part of it. 🐯🏉

Nearly three quarters of UK adults say they don’t understand how inheritance tax actually works - and 40% don’t even have a will in place.

Those figures come from a recent survey of 1,000 people across the UK. It also found that inheritance remains one of the last great family taboos - something most people know they should sort, but rarely talk about.

And yet, these conversations really do matter.

If you’ve worked hard to build something, you probably have a clear idea of who you’d like it to benefit. But unless that’s been planned for properly - and talked about openly - there’s no guarantee it’ll happen that way.

You don’t need to have all the answers. You just need to be willing to start.

Big weekend ahead with the KL Tigers RFC Annual Rugby Ball and we’re proud to be part of it!

We’re sponsoring the official Ball Signing with Jim Hamilton – former Scotland international and host of The Big Jim Show and the world’s biggest rugby podcast The Rugby Pod 🏉

Glad to support the KL Tigers community once again here in KL and beyond.

Our insight on Gold - the most tangible of safe havens.

One of the interesting justifications offered up for owning cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is that they are a safe-haven alternative to the US dollar and the dilutive effects of quantitative easing. The software algorithms, it is argued, are far more restrictive to issuance of new Bitcoins and, therefore, less reckless. This is fine in theory but, if you really are looking for a safe-haven to protect your wealth from inflation, the fact that Bitcoin can halve in just a few days tells you all you need to know about this particular asset class. The consensus trade can often be the riskiest. It is all very interesting, but it is not for the feint hearted.

The dramatic rise of crypto currencies over the last decade has been impressive. But their short history and speculative nature means that we don’t have a lot to go on when analysing how they correlate with the other major asset classes. The way in which they interact with real money, how they are taxed for example, is not yet fully developed or understood.

The same cannot be said of the world’s oldest form of money: gold. India is a good example of how gold is owned and used in the modern-day. It consumes over 20% of global production and it is estimated that that the country holds 10% of the world’s gold which is estimated to be as much as 190,000 tonnes.

The relationship that India’s citizens have with gold is not fully appreciated in the modern context. Gold has been kept by individuals in India for centuries. But, in 1962, the implementation of the Gold Control Act, forbid private ownership of bullion. However, gold manufactured into jewellery was permitted under the act. In part, this allowance facilitated the giving of largely symbolic gifts of small amounts of gold at weddings and other festive occasions. In the 1970s, onerous marginal tax rates of 95% made holding gold infinitely preferable to holding or earning rupees in cash. This drove individuals to seek various ways to own gold, at virtually any cost, including the use of black market brokers.

Times have changed, of course, but the memory of the volatility of the Indian Rupee and the affection with which gold is regarded for cultural and security reasons lives on. And the issue of financial security in India is a serious one. In the UK, we currently enjoy protection of our bank accounts under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) up to £85,000. In India, it is less than £850. As a result, it is commonplace, indeed rational, for Indian citizens to hold physical gold until the need arises for cash, which can be obtained through exchange with a money lender. Furthermore, it is also not unusual for businesses or farms to secure financial backing with physical gold. In every way, and in a very modern sense, gold is money.

In the words of John Pierpont Morgan (JP Morgan) himself, in his testimony to Congress in 1912, “Gold is money and everything else is credit”. This may be so, but how we value gold is a function of the value of everything else and, more importantly, its direction of travel. One such variable is inflation.

We saw in the first quarter of the that year the prospect of rising inflation appeared to be bugging investors more than the effects of Covid pandemic. The narrative was that the unimaginably large stimulus packages must surely be inflationary so the Federal Reserve must be prepared to raise interest rates when inflation inevitably bursts through their 2% target. Bond yields rose to reflect this, sending bond prices down. The reaction of the main equity indexes didn’t follow the typical script – they edged higher. But their rise masked a sector rotation and a recovery in bank stocks which, in the UK, had held back the FTSE relative to its international peers.

Given that gold is often cited as a hedge against inflation, it was slightly surprising that the price of gold didn’t start rising until March. Partly, this was because the Federal Reserve voiced their commitment to keep interest rates low even if inflation starts to run a little hot above their 2% target.

However, the catalyst that sent gold to a 4-month high in mid-May was the rise in the breakeven rate. This is typically the difference between the US 2-year Treasury yield and a similar Treasury bond with inflation protection attached. This rate moved to the highest level seen since 2008, just before the Great Financial Crisis.

The dovish Federal Reserve comments pushed the US dollar down against most major currencies. But this alone was not the main influence on the price of gold which, of course, is measured in US dollars. Gold priced in Sterling and Euros also rose.

In recent years, we have become used to asset price inflation and investors have been remarkably tolerant of what have been, by any measure, expensively priced stock and bond markets. Partly, this is due to the TINA trade (There Is No Alternative). Even property, as an asset class, can only hold a tiny fraction of the wealth otherwise tied up in stocks and bonds and it is, of course, generally at the mercy of interest rates in the same way as bonds.