We’ve found that, all too often, people including individuals or their advisors, rarely pay enough attention to what is happening to their money. The investment world has become extremely volatile and is fraught with possible potholes.

 

To address this problem, we offer our “High-Touch Investment Strategy.” In developing this strategy, we’ve taken techniques pioneered by other larger companies, combined them and honed them into a quantitative approach to investing that uses asset allocation theory, near-term performance and volatility measures to build and manage your portfolio.

 

For a fact sheet, including performance figures, click here.

 

Because we are not a multibillion dollar firm, we believe that we are able to manage accounts more actively than very large firms can. Not only do we add the personal touch by knowing our clients individually, we use our size to our client’s advantage by being more nimble.

 

We believe that our world economy and the investment environment are in a state of upheaval and change that may last for years. We don’t believe that anyone can predict with any consistency how investments will change because of the volatility in world economies. So, rather than trying to predict what will happen based on reams of fundamental data, we invest based on what we think really matters—near-term performance and volatility. By constantly rotating to different well-performing funds, we hope to participate in gains that are in the process of happening now, rather than predicting what we think will happen in the future. Good near-term performance gives us an indication that a certain fund is suited to the current market environment.

 

Our first step is to build a basic allocation model. Based upon the risk level of the model, targets are established for allocation into different classes of stock funds, bond funds and international funds. We also establish maximum volatility characteristics for the funds. Recognizing that conservative investors seek less aggressive funds than a speculative investor might be willing to hold, we restrict the funds in a conservative accounts to those with less volatility (up and down) than in those we might allow in a speculative account.

 

We believe that funds with a tendency to do well in the short term will continue to do well for a time. This phenomenon is known as “persistence of performance.” To work with this information, every night we download performance data on over 1,400 mutual funds. Using multiple timeframes, our system calculates a ranking for a fund’s performance. If other funds are showing better performance (based upon on the ranking criteria), then we will simply sell our fund and replace it with the better performing fund.

 

This process helps us be invested in the current market leaders and gives us a sell discipline that prevents us from continuing to hold funds that are performing poorly. As long as a fund is performing well, we hold on. When other funds are performing better, we rotate to one such fund as indicated on our ranking scale.

 

Reasons to invest:

 

·         You believe that investing in today’s world requires very active management

·         You believe that the economy is in a state of upheaval and constant monitoring of

          investments is important

·         You want personal contact with the investment decision makers

·         You want to diversify your accounts beyond the standard offerings

·         You want someone actively looking for the best performing mutual funds for you