Orderly Process

"The measure of a quality process is consistency."

Our investment process begins by creating a Wealth Optimization. This plan is designed to enable you to invest from a position of strength - what we believe is the first step in taking command, achieving more and living better. It is based on five guiding principles.

1. Always make your balance sheet, cash flow and portfolio your friend, not your foe.
2. Always compare your finances to standards of excellence that can guide you in making optimal enhancements.
3. Always back-test and stress-test your plan to reveal strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities.
4. Always know what is pulling you forward, holding you back, and serving you best—essentials to having optimal energy, confidence, and focus.
5. Always be specific and proactive by identifying and pursuing the strategic actions that will provide the best permanent advantages.

Our services aim to help you observe these principles. In doing so, we come to know you well and to know your goals, time horizon, risk temperament, cash flow needs, and other key details. These insights into your situation will guide our customized management of your portfolio. Our process has six key steps.

1. Set a long-term asset allocation target. We go well beyond such basic factors as age, time horizon, and risk temperament. Our proprietary Lifestyle Protection Analysis™ can back-test and stress-test your financial and retirement plans. This potent statistical tool helps us to recommend the best long-term asset allocation mix. It helps to ensure a 95% likelihood that your plan can withstand the most trying investment climates. Within this framework, we also provide both more aggressive and more defensive options.
2. Use both actively and passively managed funds Once the asset allocation is set, we select the right mix of active and passive managers. Our choices reflect our latest view of the trade-off between the costs of active management and the attractiveness of different asset classes. The right mix provides you with both the cost-efficiencies of indexing as well as the potential for above-average returns that talented management can provide.
3. Research and deploy best-in-class fund managers. We believe our "bread-crumb" approach is the most thorough and in-depth way to research fund managers. Not only does this approach identify managers who have delivered strong results. It shows us which funds have the talent pool and processes that we believe can reproduce strong results for years to come.
4. Make tactical shifts to take advantage of market mis-pricings. Opportunities can arise when markets overshoot on the upside or the downside. When this occurs, we may tactically reallocate portfolios to potentially add value and reduce risk. Using these tactics demands deep market intelligence and state-of-the-art trading systems. In our view, many investors over-rely on a buy-and-hold approach and are apt to make emotion-driven trades that are poorly timed. Most professionals lack the means to employ these tactics effectively, which is why we see this as a key advantage.
5. Rebalance portfolios strategically. As investment returns compound over time, we use disciplined rebalancing to ensure that our clients’ portfolios are still aligned with their plans and market conditions. In order to take advantage of runs, we avoid premature rebalancing. We look at trends, trend reversals, and fundamentals to choose a strategic time to rebalance. We believe this approach is far more robust than that of most other advisors.
6. 6. Provide regular client meetings and reviews. In addition to semi-annual reviews, we provide periodic webinars, events, alerts, and reports to stay in contact with clients. You receive monthly statements from the account custodian and quarterly reports from us. You also have access to daily online reports when you want them. Our aim is to keep you well informed but not inundated. More importantly, we want to make certain that your portfolio remains tailored to your needs and circumstances. We encourage all clients to alert us immediately to any major change in their situation. Clients have unlimited access to advisors and staff. We are always just an email, phone call, or meeting away.

While the above process is robust, please keep in mind that we call our process the Wealth with Ease® System. It’s intended to make your money work for you, and not have you work for your money. Our process takes care of necessities in the most efficient and least time-consuming manner possible. Frankly, we don’t want either you or us to over-manage money. We desire clients who share this goal.