Angus Millen’s Exchange Flags firm, Millen Capital, manages tens of millions of pounds on behalf of its clients and he claims his disruptive model offers a real alternative to the bigger players in the city. Tony McDonough reports

Angus Millen has earned a reputation in Liverpool’s wealth management community for doing things a little differently.

And his advice to those concerned about the global stock market turmoil over the last few days is typically relaxed. “We just ignore it,” he told LBN.

Working out of its Exchange Flags, his firm, Millen Capital, manages tens of millions of pounds on behalf of its clients and Mr Millen claims his disruptive model differs from the other bigger players in the Liverpool wealth management market.

For example, its Apex Lite service, launched in 2016, offer a web-based low-cost access to a global investment portfolio. Mr Millen says its flexible and simpler set-up is particularly attractive for younger investors.

It allows investors to assess the level of investment risk they want to take and then they are automatically placed into one of 10 portfolios which offer differing levels of exposure to the global equities market with the riskiest portfolios 100% made up of equities.

Plummeting markets

Such investors may have felt panicked in the last few days when they saw stock markets around the world plummet in value.

Millen Capital’s latest blog post says: “Modern life swamps us with so much news, information and punditry, which focuses on the here-and-now, that it is easy to be overwhelmed with the feeling of doom and gloom.

“The list of things to concern us is long and worrisome; Donald Trump leading the free world, a nuclear-armed North Korea; an increasingly fractious Brexit process and looming cliff-edge, to name a few.

“The natural extension of this is to worry about what the impact of all this uncertainty will have on your portfolio and in turn, on your future wealth and expenditure goals.

“The first mistake is to believe that the world is falling apart around our ears.  It most certainly is not. The second mistake is to think that the portfolio needs to be repositioned to mitigate these events.”

It goes on: “Today’s worries dominate our thinking; but can you remember what you were worrying about a year ago, or two years ago? Probably not. It has ever been thus.”

New app

In the last few weeks the firm has launched the Millen Capital app that allows its clients to view their entire finances all in one place, including bank accounts, properties, investment portfolios, pensions and all the related important documents.

Mr Millen, who founded his financial planning boutique in 1998, explained: “I was fed up of having to log into my bank’s website, then a different website to check my pension investments, another one for my wife’s ISAs, another one for my children’s investments.

“So when I read about new ‘asset aggregation technology’ in the US  in 2015, I sought to find a UK fintech firm that was ahead of the curve and partner with them, which is precisely what we’ve done.”