APM has changed its name.
For our first four years in business we operated in loose association with the highly renowned merchant Albany Vintners (hence our original moniker), and throughout this period we shared a common director. The benefits at that time to the respective businesses will not escape you; the embryonic APM was instantly credible, tucking under the wing of an established and respected business, and Albany Vintners as the primary supplier benefited from the increased order flow.
So what’s changed?
Well, APM has rather come of age. For consumers looking for an excellent merchant with great prices, then Albany Vintners remains the top choice. But a merchant’s business and a fine wine investment advisor’s business are very different animals, and in many respects the modus operandi of each and the needs of their respective clients are in disharmony.
A merchant’s work is done once the customer has bought and the wine delivered – the needs of the business / customer relationship are fulfilled. Conversely, an investment advisor’s work is only just beginning at that moment. The merchant’s raison d’être is to leave the customer with a pile of wonderful wine; the bigger the better. The investment advisor’s role, however, is to leave the customer with no wine at the end of the process, but rather a profit.
Now this may sound patently obvious in this context, but we at APM are continuously astonished by the degree to which our competitors appear to overlook this core principal of the investment process. Most wine investment businesses, it seems to us, are predicated on encouraging clients to build an ever increasing portfolio. Their philosophy seems to be “if it’s going up in value, why wouldn’t you simply want more, more, more?” The concept of actually realising a profit for their clients appears to be at best anathema to them, and at worst it is actively discouraged.
Conversely, at APM, we understand that one’s drinking portfolio is one’s drinking portfolio, and one’s investment portfolio is precisely that; an investment. We will never blur the boundaries and we take our customer’s financial matters every bit as seriously as their stockbroker would. Most importantly, we stay focused on that profit.
Seemingly most ‘investment advice’ in the fine wine space is based on purely qualitative assessments which are then bought and sold at (often crippling) merchant bid / offer spread. This simply won’t do. And that’s why APM has pioneered market leading quantitative stock selection processes, most notably by way of our proprietary algorithm, and why we are innovating groundbreaking stock market-esque trading processes.
It’s also why it’s not in the best interests of our clients for our business to be in bed with any single merchant or – specifically – tied to its pricing policy. We have long argued that dominance of the major merchants in the market is against the interests of the investor. The major merchants control the bid /offer spread, and naturally enough, the higher it is the more profitable they become. At APM, however, would argue that the ability to trade inside this spread should not only be a benefit of dealing with a wine investment company, but it is in actual fact their responsibility.
And so, in order to allow both Albany Vintners and APM to flourish and excel in their individual spaces, we have executed a management buy-out of Marcus Edwards’ − MD of Albany Vintners − shares, and respectfully changed our name in order to avoid confusion.
And that space has enabled us to take on board a new director – Philip Staveley, former Head of Emerging Markets for Deutsche Bank and Nomura International. Philip’s enviable wealth of experience and expertise will doubtless prove invaluable as we continue to develop our private client stock broking business, but where the denominator is fine wine.
Welcome to Amphora Portfolio Management!
David Jackson
Director
20th Sep. 2013