Investment Planning

Everyone has different goals for their investment portfolio. Using your unique values and objectives, we create a plan specifically for you. Our discovery process is designed to identify your values, goals, relationships, financial situation, and personal interests. Our process is relationship driven. Therefore, we want to be familiar with the whole of your life, not just your financial life.

Once we have a thorough understanding of your specific situation, we will create a tailored investment plan which will guide the construction and maintenance of your portfolio. Finally, we construct a portfolio suited to your specific objectives and risk profile.

We consider the following factors as we create your investment plan:

Time Horizon: We believe investing should be a long-term process. We believe that markets reward long-term investors.

Risk: While we can try to mitigate risk, we cannot eliminate it. Risk and expected return are related. Therefore, we must assume a certain level of risk to achieve an expected return threshold. In any investment plan, it is important to recognize and appropriately manage the types and the amount of risk you are taking. This will greatly strengthen your ability to adhere to your long-term investment plan.

Rate-of-Return Objective: Every investment choice you make involves a tradeoff between risk and return. In general, the less risk within your portfolio, the lower its growth potential — and vice-versa. To increase the expected rate of return for your portfolio, you will typically have to take more risk. Thus, your rate-of-return objective must match the realistic opportunities that you have, given your time horizon and your risk profile.

Asset Allocation: Asset allocation should be your first investment decision. Your unique asset allocation will be a crucial piece of your overall investment plan. Equity exposure is used to maximize expected returns while fixed income is used to stabilize the portfolio against the equity risk (and potentially supply a controllable income stream). The bottom line: Building a prudent portfolio requires careful consideration of the unique characteristics of both equities and fixed income and what each can add to the portfolio.

Portfolio Construction: Three key investment principles we stress are the efficiency of capital markets according to the tenets of Modern Portfolio Theory, the importance of diversification, and the discipline of remaining invested. For most investors, building a truly diversified equity portfolio using individual securities is not the most efficient or cost-effective method. We believe it is preferable to implement a well-diversified portfolio using asset class funds.