Single Family Offices reduce equities, increase cash, and ETF education

Education will increase the allocation that family offices in Europe make to structured products and exchange traded funds (ETFs), says Gary Dugan, chief investment officer EMEA of Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and Bruce Love of Campden Research. Both were talking after the publication of a report by Merrill and Campden which concluded that single family offices (SFOs) in Europe responded to the 2008 economic crisis by pulling their money out of equities and putting it into cash.

The report was based on a survey of the 500-650 single family offices in Europe, of which 5% invest through ETFs and 4% by buying structured products. "The average weighting of ETFs and structured products across SFO portfolios belies some large differences in individual offices," says Campden Research's Bruce Love. "In some cases, ETFs were used for up to 20% of assets, whereas some SFOs did not use them at all. However, several survey respondents expressed a keen interest in ETFs and a desire