In my opinion, having a good understanding of the market's and leading stock's price and volume action could help give your ISA and SIPP returns a boost.

The majority of people looking for investment advice in the UK rely on a financial adviser.

Unfortunately, many of them don't appreciate some of the flaws still evident in the investment industry. In this post, we'll look at four of the biggest investment problems that consumers can still face.

My name is Paul Sutherland, I'm ISACO's Managing Director and a regular contributor to this blog. In this post, I wanted to share my personal experience of Shadow Investing over the last eleven years*.

I have been Shadow Investing my brother Stephen since the year 2000. Stephen Sutherland is ISACO's Chief Investment Strategist and bestselling author of Liquid Millionaire. Stephen is one of the UK's leading growth fund investors and a regular commentator on business television, radio, personal finance newspapers, magazines and other investment media.

HIRE CAR™ is a screening tool I created to help me quickly find quality investment funds.

Funds are managed and controlled by a professional fund manager. The manager makes investment decisions on what companies to buy and what to sell.

When the market is healthy, my aim is to find the best fund manager using HIRE CAR™ as my guide. Here's a brief introduction to its track record.

One of the questions we are most often asked by potential investors is a simple one - 'is now a good time to invest?'.

In a recent edition of our monthly premium client newsletter The Big Picture, Stephen Sutherland, our Chief Investment Strategist, wrote:

“My take is and has been for some time now that the market over the next decade will outperform. There are numerous facts and statistics that point to the likelihood of outperformance and the behaviour of the market over the last three years gives me even more reasons to believe a stock market boom may have already begun. My belief is the ‘boom period’ started back in 2009.”

Today I wanted to expand on one of my Top Ten Tips for Successful ISA investing and the tip in question is Tip 4: 'Park in cash during a bear market' (for more on my other nine tips, please just download our Top 10 Tips for Successful ISA Investing).

Your aim as an ISA and SIPP investor should be to profit in rising markets and protect in falling markets. This is not easy to do but is made easier when you understand how market cycles operate.

When we help investors plan for the future, we take them through our Investment Appraisal process. This has many similarities to a portfolio analysis, but with the particular needs of ISA and SIPP investors in mind.

This is an important question that I’m often asked. When answering, I usually start by explaining what makes proactive investors different. In essence, they are investors who initiate change rather than just reacting to events.

In my opinion, strong proactive investors can perform better than those who merely react. This is because they aim to ‘time the market’ rather than just responding to it.

When I’m speaking to investors, they sometimes ask about ‘return on invested capital'.

Return on invested capital is an investment measure used to assess a company's efficiency at allocating the capital under its control to profitable investments.

In this way, return on invested capital gives a sense of how well a company is using its money to generate returns. Comparing a company's return on invested capital with its cost of capital reveals whether invested capital is being used effectively.

Value investing remains topical in the current climate, so in this post we’ll look at this strategy in a little more detail and how it contrasts with our approach.

ISACO’s aim is to help ISA and SIPP investors achieve their investment goals faster.  For more information on ISA investing, you may be interested in our free Top 10 Tips for Successful ISA Investing.