Paul McAllen & Co Independent Financial Advisers closed in 2024, with most employees safely landed into new roles and most clients into the continuing care of PM&Co-trained people.
Paul McAllen has been a financial services professional for over 30 years, most recently the founder of his own renowned IFA firm which managed close to £100m for individual clients, including senior academic and medical professionals, diplomats and government advisers, from 2008 to 2025.
Relative returns are everything. Our clients valued the way we proved, over the long term, that our financial analysis could help them beat the market when it rises and mitigate volatility in trickier times, all at the right level of risk.
With research going back to 1900, and our own independent in-house research system to look forward, we helped our clients navigate all sorts of investment climates, good and bad. Our clients valued PM&Co’s advice to protect their money in challenging environments such as The Credit Crunch and post-Brexit.
In 2020, as markets fell off the Coronavirus Cliff, we reassured our clients that we had helped them mitigate risk and that they should focus on the long term, on staying safe and well, and their investments would be just fine. In the end, not one of our investment clients lost money in 2020, even though the UK stockmarket ended the year down by around 13% and at one point had fallen by 35%.
In tricky times since 2020, with economic worries, a post-COVID supply squeeze, and war in Europe affecting markets and causing inflation, we helped clients keep calm and take a long term view with long term money.
Through into 2024 and beyond as PM&Co financial analysis, we helped our clients navigate choppy markets and worrying times, when the faint-hearted might miss out by knee-jerking or by being stuck in “analysis paralysis”.
We helped our clients with simple, non-contentious, “vanilla” financial planning. We found the nooks and crannies of financial planning, that other advisers cannot reach, to help them improve their position.
Ignore the short term noise. None of your investment decisions are something that you need to delay or change due what you might hear day to day in the media or because of short term hype and hyperbole about the current economic and political situation. If your money is invested currently, it’ll stay invested, so market timing isn’t an issue, as long as you’re relaxed that market volatility (though no doubt worrying, in “interesting times”) can actually work for long term investors using the right investment strategies. So you should stay invested, continue with The Plan, continue adding long term money to your portfolio (it’s cheaper to buy-in if markets are down a little!), not change any of your financial plans, and simply trust your analysis to deal with the work on protecting and growing your money for the long term.
By the time you’ve read it in the papers or your mate from the pub or at work has told you about this great tip or this great problem ahead, your fund managers will be well aware of it and will have decided what action to take to protect, or take advantage, as necessary. Don’t try to be too clever it’s hard to beat the market. Be wary of scams and be sceptical of jumping on the bandwagon. A cheap app might not help you when the markets turn: take Independent Financial Advice. That could be priceless, instead of hoping that low charges automatically mean good value: they often don’t.
Should you delay investing in volatile times? No. Studies show over and over that it’s time IN the market, not timing the markets that gives the greatest success. Invest early, invest often. Sit tight. Take advice. And take the long term view.
Remember: past performance is not a guide to future returns. The value of your investments can fall as well as rise and is not guaranteed. Any income generated may fluctuate (this may partly be the result of exchange rate fluctuations) and investors may not get back the full amount invested.
