What are Irish Life Multi Asset Portfolio (MAPs) Funds?
By Irish Life
Irish Life’s MAPS, or Multi-Asset Portfolios, are a range of investment funds that invest in a mix of different asset classes, such as equities, bonds, property, and cash. The aim of MAPs funds are to provide diversified investment solutions that suit different risk profiles and investment goals.
Each MAPs fund is managed to a specific risk level, designed to suit different attitudes to risk.
With Smart Invest, you can invest in a MAPs fund suited to your risk profile through a life insurance plan called FlexInvest.
Diversified Portfolio
Each MAPs fund aims to create a diversified portfolio tailored to specific risk profiles. By diversifying your investments, you're essentially "not putting all your eggs in one basket." This means that if one particular investment performs poorly, you won't lose all of your money because you have other investments that can balance out those losses.
Improved chance of positive returns over the long-term
By diversifying, you increase your chances of benefiting from different market cycles and economic conditions, which can help improve your chance of positive returns over the long term.
Here are a few benefits of investing in Irish Life MAPs funds
Diversification refers to the practice of spreading your investment portfolio across different asset classes, sectors, and geographic regions, in order to reduce overall risk and increase the likelihood of positive returns over the long term.
The MAPs funds are built on the beliefs that diversification offers a potentially smoother journey and that risk management reduces the impact of the various ups and downs in the underlying investments.
Let's say you put all your money into investing in an orange grove. But the grove gets struck with a new disease, and before it can be stopped, the crop fails. Your money's down the drain alongside the sour orange juice.
But a few farms over, the apples are thriving. If you had invested in both, you could have gained from the glut of apples. Even if you lost money on oranges, you would benefit from diversifying your investment into apples as well.
MAPs funds diversification aims to ensure that the performance of the funds is not dependent on any one:
- Asset type
- Sector
- Geographical region
- Investment manager
- Investment style
Each Irish Life MAPs fund is diversified across a range of assets with different risk profiles. The assets include shares, bonds, property, and cash. When diversifying the portfolio, Irish Life Investment Managers (ILM), the investment manager for the MAPs funds, may also invest in externally managed investment funds . And within each of the different asset types, they're diversified even further.
The type of assets that the MAPs funds invest in can include:
If you’d like more details on the performance of the assets in each category, and how Irish Life Investment Managers (ILIM) allocates money across each asset class, ILIM produces an in-depth look at MAPs funds’ performance every three months.
Irish Life Investment Managers (ILIM), an investment firm, manages the Irish Life MAP funds. Irish Life has been working with clients to deliver investment solutions for over 80 years. ILIM manages assets worth over 92.7 billion (as of 31 December 2022) across a broad range of asset classes.
Who manages the MAPs funds?
How are MAPs funds managed?
Regular reviews
ILIM regularly reviews Irish Life MAPs funds, aiming to enhance risk management, increase the expected fund returns, or both
Dynamic Share to Cash (DSC) model
This model aims to reduce the amount invested in shares and increase the amount in cash when it identifies greater potential for stock market falls
Currency hedging
ILIM uses a systematic currency hedging process which aims to limit the negative impact foreign currency moves can have on investment returns
Rebalancing
See more below
What is rebalancing?
This is one of the most important risk management tools used by ILIM. ILIM adjusts the asset split (i.e. rebalances) for each Irish Life MAPS fund every three months back to its intended asset split. This means that you don’t have to worry about a fund becoming a higher risk rating than the one you originally invested in. The example below shows why rebalancing is important and what could happen without it. ILIM avoids this change in asset split by rebalancing the fund to keep it in line with its intended split. ILIM rebalances each of the MAPs funds every quarter, which means that each fund will not drift over time.
At the start of your journey with Smart Invest, you'll be asked questions to help us understand your attitude to and capacity for investment risk. Then, we recommend one of the MAPs funds for you. The recommendation is based on the answers you provide to match a plan with the “type” of investor you are.
Smart Invest has three investor types that align with each of the three MAPs funds that we have on offer:
- Conservative
- Balanced
- Experienced
These questions are designed to help you (and us) understand what type of investor you are and which of our three investment options is best suited to you.
The same expertise goes into the questions we ask you, and the recommendation you’ll get, if you met us in person or if you were answering when using Smart Invest.