Process

“Investing with discipline” summarizes our operating system and investment philosophy.  Through the 35 years of Wall St. experience we have developed a unique discipline in the allocation of capital and selection of investments.  The first step in our selection process is to record your investment objectives and risk tolerance.  With this as our guide we overlay our asset allocation strategy and adjust it until we find a solution that meets your objectives and risk.  Depending on the type of account opened and goals of the account, we apply a different allocation strategy.

For general portfolio allocation, we allocate your capital based on the relative attractiveness of cash, equity, and fixed income securities.  At the present time our general allocation for balanced accounts is 10% cash, 65% equity and 25% bonds.  For the cash portions we currently use U.S. Treasury bills or Government money market funds.  For the equity portion we weight different sectors of the economy based on the relative attractiveness of each sector compared to all other sectors.  We then select the most attractive securities for long term growth and quality from those sectors and weight them appropriately.

Fixed income portfolios are allocated between maturity lengths of short-term, intermediate, or long-term maturity.  We also apply our relative attractiveness philosophy to other sectors of the fixed income market such as US Treasury, Government Agency, Tax Free Municipal, Corporate Bonds and CD’s (Insured certificates of deposit) to determine which sectors have the greatest relative attractiveness.

On the other hand, if you choose an outside manager, we can assist you in the selection process if you currently do not have a manager.  Our outside independent manager selection process is just as rigorous as our equity and bond selection.  We select from 2000 different managers who cover a variety of investment styles.  Together we complete your risk tolerance and investment goal questionnaire to aide in the screening process.  Using this questionnaire we reduce the 2000 major independent managers to just a very few most suited to your needs.

 
As an extended service, if you currently have an independent manager(s) that you are happy with, we can transfer your portfolio intact to our platform.  You keep your portfolio and your same managers, even the “closed” managers, who are not accepting new accounts, and we will save you up to 75% in expenses.