How We Think About Investing

As your wealth grows, managing it and aligning it with your objectives becomes more complicated. We help craft a customized strategy tailored to your specific needs. We follow certain key principles that make the process most effective:

 

Partnership

Our meetings focus on understanding you, your goals and the issues that are important to you. Our discussions are wide-reaching and personal.

As we get to know you, we help you understand investment strategies in order to make well-informed decisions aligned with your long-term objectives.

 

Smart And Steady Wins The Race

The financial markets are largely unpredictable over the short term. We don’t purport to know where they are heading tomorrow, and we don’t traffic in the so-called “next big thing.” Instead, we do our best to develop a well-reasoned, long-range outlook, and to design portfolios that are balanced over various market conditions. That means minimizing the level of risk you assume in order to pursue the returns you need, aiming for greater consistency over time. We employ asset allocation, modern portfolio theory, valuation and technical analysis to design individual portfolios for each client, and we harness the best academic thinking in finance science to create portfolios that are durable and resilient.

 

Strength Lies In Understanding Limitations

There are a lot of great ideas in modern finance—but no perfect ones. A great deal of thought goes into our asset management process, but we still put significant stock in the efficiency of markets. As a result, we use a combination of indexed approaches and active management strategies. Sometimes the simplest is the best; sometimes complexity can improve results. We try to strike the balance that is right for each client, aiming for the best overall portfolio performance.

 

Portfolio Expenses

One way to improve your net returns is to reduce your costs. In selecting investments for portfolios, we try to keep fees and taxes to a minimum. We want to help maximize not just what you make, but what you keep.

 

Taxes

For some investors, taxes on investments can exceed 50 percent. We incorporate several strategies to help minimize the impact for each client:

  • We focus not just on asset allocation, but also on asset location. We are very deliberate about where we hold each investment—particularly those that tend to be tax burdened. To the degree we can, we hold those investments in tax-advantaged accounts, like IRAs and Roth IRAs, to minimize the income tax impact.
  • We select investments that we expect to generate minimal ongoing tax costs.
  • Where funds are making significant distributions, we determine if it is to your advantage to sell them prior to the distribution so that you can avoid associated taxes.
  • Where we have holdings with losses, we will recommend that you sell them to recognize the losses and replace them with similar investments in order to offset gains or ordinary income.
    Taxes are a necessary component of living in a civilized society—but why pay more than you have to?
 

Investment Selection

We try to identify managers who thrive due to insight and skill rather than luck. We examine quantitative and qualitative measures to determine their effectiveness and whether they have the right structure, procedures and incentives. And where we think active management is less likely to yield improved performance, we seek to keep costs low and approximate an index.