Investing

Defined Investment Goals

A sound investment plan starts with defining objectives and goals. Defining these goals is essential because we tailor each portfolio to your time horizon, risk tolerance, income needs, liquidity position, and investment experience. Because many investment objectives are long-term in nature, we’ll help you develop an investment plan that will endure changing market environments.

Strategic Portfolio Design

Once we fully understand your investment objectives we will develop a strategic asset allocation for your portfolio that balances risk and return. This process involves allocating your portfolio among different asset classes (e.g. stocks and bonds) in accordance with your investment objectives.

Research has shown that asset allocation is the primary driver of returns for investors holding broadly diversified portfolios. Traditionally many portfolios have only included U.S. stocks, bonds and cash. We take a more dynamic approach in diversifying portfolios among asset classes that are global in nature and exhibit low correlation with one another.

While we generally feel that markets are efficient, we recognize there are distortions in pricing during certain market environments. After we select a strategic asset allocation, we actively manage your portfolio to take advantage of mispriced markets.

Investment Selection

There is a wide debate among market participants over the merits of active versus passive investment strategies. We believe that both strategies have merit in building long-term, diversified portfolios. Therefore, we utilize both passively managed index and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and actively managed funds. In particular, we seek actively managed funds with experienced managers that have performed well during down markets. We also seek managers that have value-tilted strategies.

Cost and Tax-Efficient

History has proven that investors have no control over market returns. However, investors do have some control over expenses and taxes.

We reduce expenses in two ways. First, we offer our investment management services at a cost lower than the average advisory firm. Second, we create portfolios using low cost index and actively managed funds.

We utilize tax-efficient strategies in both the design and management of portfolios. We seek to identify the optimal investments to hold in varying types of accounts and then customize each portfolio utilizing rebalancing, cash management, and tax-loss harvesting strategies.

Rebalancing

Portfolios will generally deviate over time as markets change and certain holdings outperform others. Your investment objectives may change over time and portfolios need to be adjusted to align with your risk tolerance and time horizon. We work with each client to periodically rebalance when portfolios deviate from strategic allocations in an effort to maximize returns for a given level of risk.

Fiduciary

As a registered investment advisor, we have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest. We take an unbiased approach to selecting investments for your portfolio. We are an independent firm and do not receive commissions for selling products or receive payments from fund companies. Since we are an independent firm, we have the unique ability to invest with any manager or strategy from among the investment universe. This can be a daunting task since there are over 12,000 mutual funds and ETFs to choose from. Our goal is to design an unbiased, low cost, tax-efficient portfolio of passive and active managers that balances risk and return.