Investing
Our goal is to work with our clients towards achieving a successful retirement so they can continue to live their current lifestyle. In order to accomplish this objective, we build portfolios that include certain characteristics:
- Diversification: It’s important to own assets that typically don’t all go up or down at the same time. By doing so, it helps to reduce volatility within a portfolio.
- Rebalancing: Studies1 have shown that rebalancing portfolios can actually add to annual returns. When certain assets go up, it’s important to sell a portion to buy investments that may have lost value. Rebalancing promotes the time-honored concept of buying low and selling high.
- Value: Research2 has demonstrated that portfolios that tilt towards value perform better over time. Value stocks are defined as companies that have higher dividends and/ or lower price/earnings ratios than their peers.
- Low-fee funds: We are authorized to utilize mutual funds from Dimensional Funds for our clients. DFA is a mutual fund company whose investment philosophy is guided by the research of multiple Nobel Prize winners, so their passively managed funds tend to favor such factors as value, size, and profitability.
- Buckets: Client portfolios are typically divided into four buckets, with less volatile investments constituting the buckets that will fund the early years of retirement. The goal of this strategy is to reduce client worries about their finances as they start their retirement journey.
We take the long view, paying little attention to daily headlines and ‘breaking news.’ We prefer to work with clients that have a lengthy time horizon, and their portfolios tend to reflect those needs.