Our Approach
Our investment philosophy is based on five key drivers: Personal Attention and Service, Tailored and Tactical Discipline, Performance-Focused, Independent Thinking, and Tax Efficiency and Mindful of Costs.
Personal Attention and Service – We believe each of our clients has a unique set of needs and deserves a truly personal approach.
We have made a commitment to spend sufficient time with each client to truly understand their unique situation, taking into account their age, finances and household situation.
As a result we work with you to design a plan and tailored investment portfolio to meet your individual income and/or growth needs, monitor your plan and restructure your investment portfolio in a timely manner.
Tailored and Tactical Discipline – Our tailored approach is focused on building solutions and setting goals for you and your investment portfolio. We believe tactical asset allocation and investment style diversification are keys to achieving competitive, long-term returns with acceptable levels of risk.
Our tactical approach allows us to work with you to incorporate specific restrictions and/or act unconstrained, e.g. willingness to exclude specific assets or sectors, underweight/overweight specific assets or sectors, or hold cash, as needed to our clients’ portfolios. This tactical approach is based on four metric categories:
- Individual price relative to historical averages (Free cash-flow, earning, and book value)
- P/E relative to historical average for asset/sector/market.
- Asset or sector percentage relative to the 200 day moving average.
- Changes in forecasts or probabilities of market influences, e.g. interest rates, inflation, exchange rates, tax policy, geopolitical environment, natural events, supply/demand, changes in market structure, Fed Policy, etc…
We will build your personal investment portfolio with low-cost securities, i.e. stocks, exchange trade funds (ETFs), and "no-load", institutional bond funds. This philosophy allows transparency, i.e. you know what you own, and also allows your portfolio to be modified to suit your needs and managed for tax savings. Once established, we will monitor and adjust your tailored portfolio in response to new opportunities and changes in economic outlook.
Performance Focused – Our aim is to deliver significant annual real returns to our clients over the long term.
Our strategy to achieve this is to passionately build better, smarter, more adaptive portfolios which can inform our security selection and risk management in a way that is consistent, and adaptive to the reality of the prevailing economic environment.
Independent Thinking – We do not rely on popular trends, beliefs and outdated academic theories which may dictate other investment managers’ investment decisions.
Rather our unified team of portfolio managers applies independent thinking through a highly structured analytical framework that is supported by world class research tools informed by real-time market information. This disciplined, situationally aware ethic enables us to focus solely on achieving strong risk-adjusted returns for our clients.
Tax Efficiency and Mindful of Costs - We believe you need a wise wealth management strategy. Therefore, we believe controlling expenses and taxes associated with investing will have a significant impact on an investment portfolio’s performance. We maximize after-tax returns, i.e. keep more of what you earn, by paying less tax!
We operate on a fee-only basis that is transparent and based only on assets under management.
We then continue active tax management, e.g. deferring tax gains, harvesting tax losses, and determining which accounts ( taxable, tax-deferred, or tax-free) you will receive distributions in order to keep you in a consistently low tax bracket. This can tangibly add to your long-term wealth.