Ten years after Brexit, clients are still not rushing to change their minds

Incredibly, it’s now 10 years since the EU referendum. 10 years since the bus, the leaflets, the arguments around dinner tables and the sudden discovery that almost everyone we knew had much stronger views on trade policy than we could have imagined.

For some people, Brexit was about sovereignty; for others, it was about trade, immigration, national identity, regulation, the NHS, or a general sense that the country needed to ‘take back control’ over its future.

A decade on, we wanted to know how our clients look back on the decision and its impact on their own lives and investments.

So, in our latest client survey, we’ve drilled down into some hot Brexit topics!

Firstly, our clients were fairly evenly split in 2016 – albeit not reflective of the actual referendum result. 52% said they voted Remain, while 43.75% voted Leave.

What’s interesting, though, is how firmly held many of those views remain. Asked whether, knowing what they know now, they would vote the same way again, 71% said they would and only 12% have changed their minds.

But that doesn’t mean everyone thinks Brexit has been an obvious success. When asked whether Brexit has been good or bad for them personally, the largest group, 46%, said it had been neither good nor bad. 34% said it’d been bad, compared with just 15% who were positive about the impacts.

One client said: “It hasn’t personally affected me greatly, but it has made a number of things, such as travel and ordering things online from the EU, more difficult, but the effect on Britain as a whole has been almost universally negative.”

There were also comments from business owners and frequent travellers. One client said the personal impact on their ability to export to the EU had made it “more difficult to grow in Europe”, while another said Brexit had made going to their home in France “much more restrictive”.

Since the referendum, of course, investors have had to live through more than Brexit. We’ve had a global pandemic, war in Ukraine and more recently Iran, and political instability in the UK. Portfolios have therefore had many difficult moments, but long-term investors have also seen significant positive performance over the same period too.

So, we also asked whether, despite that bumpy ride, positive portfolio performance had made clients feel more positive or more negative about Brexit’s impact on the UK economy.

Only 16% said their view had become more positive. More than twice as many, 35%, said their view had become more negative.

That suggests clients are separating the performance of their own investments from the performance of the UK economy.

As one client put it: “As my portfolio is global, the UK economy does not impact the fund value to any great extent.”

A well-diversified portfolio isn’t a referendum on one country or one political decision; it’s designed to spread risk across sectors, currencies and assets. Although it doesn’t make investors immune from political events, it does mean their long-term outcomes are not tied exclusively to the UK economy.

It’s also why short-term shocks can feel dramatic at the time, but are often less significant when viewed over several years. Asked how episodes like this make them feel about investing, only 18% said they’d made them more hesitant, with 13% saying they felt more resilient, and a whopping 69% reporting no change.

One client captured the long-term view neatly with the age old adage: “It’s not timing the market, but time in the market.”

Managing Director Karl Pemberton commented on the survey results; “Ten years after Brexit, clients’ views on the referendum remain divided and, in many cases, firmly held. Some still see it as the right decision while others think it was a mistake.

But whilst Brexit may still divide opinion,  it is great to see  discipline of long-term investing remaining much the same.”