Why Our Office Is Different?

To be honest we do things differently. This industry was built on a profile of salespeople who  gave you a call when they wanted to sell you something.  We touch our clients over 50 times a year.  We snail mail or email our monthly reports (4 quarterly economic updates, 2 tax letters and a host of other timely subjects), we have 4 – 6 Client Education events (usually dinners but an occasional brunch) and our two open client celebrations during the year.  This profession is made up of people who can decide what is printed on their business card.  You can be a consultant, financial advisor, insurance professional, financial planner or a host of other names.  While it is hard to speak in absolutes, some do nothing more than try to fit a round peg (client) into a square hole (product).  In our office we take the time to sit and spend hours listening before we put together a plan that does its best to invest based our clients goals, values and objectives.

Fact-Based Investing:  Our Philosophy

Our investment philosophy centers around our prevailing thought about how financial markets ‘really’ work:  That is, that they’re self-contained beasts that simply do what they want, vs. what the outside world says they should do!

A lot of advisors trade their clients’ assets based on fundamental concerns (i.e., things happening in the world outside the markets: geopolitical events, business news and forecasts, World Bank/IMF activity, fiscal policy, Fed policy, government reports, investor-sentiment polls, etc.) - concerns that are frequently never reflected in the markets for more than a day or two or, if they’re reflected at all, the follow-on questions of ‘Starting when?’ and ‘For how long?’, can’t be answered.  Most advisors also over-allocate client assets to academic-based methods; especially prominent among these is the heavy allocation of monies to certain asset classes, purely based on those asset classes’ historical performance (known as ‘strategic’ allocations) … even when those very asset classes haven’t done enough in recent time frames to truly earn their way into current client portfolios at all. 

We, however, do things quite differently:  We base our investment decisions on the probabilities that certain market scenarios either will or won’t unfold, purely via real-time analyses of mathematical data from inside the markets - the place where we can actually quantify a one-to-one cause and effect on investments!

Our investment-management techniques exploit market trends that occur over multiple time frames - weeks, months and years - with momentum as the biggest input in identifying not only ‘big’ market trends, but also the relative-strength winners among the different asset classes we use - stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. - to populate our clients’ portfolios.

We don’t ‘anticipate’ trends in markets or in individual asset classes; ultimately, those sorts of guesses are fraught with peril. On the contrary: We only latch-onto up or down trends when they actually come into being.  Our one-two punch of no predictions + mathematical rule-sets for entering and exiting markets and assets, works, far more often than it doesn’t - and that truism largely spares the advisor and investor the type of mental anguish that’s assured to be a constant companion with other, less-reliable methods: the age-old ‘Do I take this trade, or not?’ agony!

In sum:  ‘What might be’ = forecast-based, fundamental-based investing; ‘What should be’ = academic theories on investing; ‘What is’ = reacting to markets in real time, based on things we can quantify … that’s what we do!