Hedge Funds Review events focus on quality. The Family Office Leadership Summit held over two days in London brought together a unique mixture of family offices (both single and multi), a range of investment opportunities and key note speakers.

Some of these speakers included John Redwood, chairman of Evercore Pan-Asset Capital Management; economist Roger Nightingale; JP Morgan Asset Management global multi-asset group managing director Jeffery Gelle; Stonehage’s family office head Andrew Rodger; Caroline Garnham, a partner at law firm Lawrence Graham; Corazon Capital chief executive Ian Morley; Jonathan Fry, director and founder of Fry Family Office; Gero Bauknecht, president of Bauknecht Capital; Liontrust’s fixed-income senior portfolio manager James Sclater and many more.

The conference was told about a unique research report by Heinrich von Liechtenstein, a professor at IESE Business School at the University of Navarra, Barcelona. The report was based on over 160 detailed questionnaires and personal interviews with leading family offices over the world.

Delegates were also told about the variety of family offices. Not all are called ‘family offices’ and not all are designed to meet every need of a family. The choice should fall to the individual family, believe family office directors. “It’s totally up to wealthy families what they do. It’s their money,” says Lord North Street co-founder William Drake. He says Lord North Street outsources quite a lot of the services it provides to its clients and is “not pretending to be experts at everything”.

Duncan Straughen, director of Wates Family Office, explained how he worked closely with family members to help create the infrastructure and support needed for an actively engaged owners group. The family was just completing a transfer of ownership between generations. So in April 2008 as an integral part of this strategy, the family was looking at how to build the capability to deliver a broadening of the shareholders’ investments, financial interests and philanthropic goals.

Investors were shocked in 2008 when they discovered diversifying a portfolio could not get rid of risk. Economists were less unsettled. They tend to look at a whole range of views, examining data and information domestically and globally in order to form an opinion about what might happen next. “We’re interested in the future. But the only guide is the past and that is an imperfect guide, particularly as our understanding of the past changes as future unfolds,” noted  Redwood in his keynote address.