Transcript

MARTIN UPTON

Hello everyone, I’m Martin Upton of the Open University’s True Potential Centre. Welcome to the first week of Managing My Investments – the course that aims to help you align your investment strategy with your future financial needs.

We start the week by examining the importance of savings and investments for individuals and the economy as a whole. We then take stock of how well we fare in the UK when undertaking investments.

The overall picture presents issues of concern. Arguably we don’t do particularly well, both in terms of how much we save and the range of investments we employ. We’ll try to decipher why this is the case. We’ll then start to assemble the building blocks of an investment strategy by looking at the principles and plans that should underpin investment management. These include understanding your risk appetite and your time horizon for investment planning.

We also start to get to grips with two of the central determinants of investment returns interest rates and share prices. We look at recent trends in these in the UK and the drivers of these trends. It’s all part of the process of starting to build your confidence in understanding what influences the returns you can get for different types of investments.

So, at the end of the first week you should understand the investment record in the UK, the first fundamentals of devising an investment strategy and the features of two major determinants of investment returns. So let’s get going with Week One!