Transparency and Simplicity are winning strategies

Central to the Wealth Management plan is the investment portfolio. We structure low cost, risk efficient investment portfolios, with an emphasis on index-based products. We strive for simplicity and transparency, ensuring that our clients understand the investments in their portfolios. The key determinant of an investment portfolio's long-term performance is a wisely constructed asset allocation strategy. Actively managed portfolios have a long history of underperforming their benchmarks, while charging the highest fees.

Complexity in a portfolio is Wall Street's way of "looking smart" and justifying management fees.

Our Approach to Asset Allocation

We create portfolios that have, in our judgment, the greatest probability of achieving the client’s specific goals (e.g. retirement, charitable gifting, etc.) Critical to this approach is the alignment of portfolio risk with the client's tolerance and expectation.

We are proponents of Modern Portfolio Theory and the teachings of Markowitz and Sharpe in building portfolios that deliver the highest returns relative to the overall risk of the combined assets classes. Central to this optimizing strategy is identifying assets classes that exhibit non-correlating risks as measured by standard deviation (or volatility) of returns and then diversifying investment across the various asset classes to deliver the most "efficient" portfolios.

Opportunistic Rebalancing

Regular monitoring and adherence to asset allocation targets can enhance the performance of an investment portfolio. We establish specific asset allocation targets for each client and "allowable bands" of fluctuation. We rebalance opportunistically when the allocations move outside the bands. As markets have a tendency to revert to the mean, this rebalancing activity has added to performance in the past by forcing the discipline of selling the"over-valued" asset class and buying the "under-valued" asset class.