Investing for Your Lifetime
Risk and Return Are Inseparable
It is foolish to discuss investment returns without also understanding the risks involved in achieving those returns. Our investment focus is to maximize returns without taking more risk than is appropriate for each specific client.
In order to do this, we must first determine:
- The rate of return needed to achieve your financial goals.
- The level of risk you are willing to take.
This is determined by evaluating your tolerance for risk and personal financial circumstances.
Beyond Asset Allocation
Asset allocation is the decision about the percentage of your portfolio you invest in different asset classes. While most discussions about investment research stop with asset allocation, the actual research doesn’t. There is a large and growing body of investment research that has been conducted independently of the vested interests on Wall Street. To date, some of the key findings are:
- The asset allocation decision is the most important.
- Active investment managers are unable to consistently outperform the "market".
- Certain asset classes have historically performed better than others have.
Our investment philosophy is "Passive" as opposed to "Active." We have chosen this because the internal costs of passive investing are much lower than actively managed funds and because historically over the long run Passive managed mutual funds generally out perform Actively managed ones. We use institutional class funds managed by Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). We have chosen the DFA funds because they are a direct result of the investment research and have been carefully designed and managed to take advantage of all that the research has taught us. These are well-managed funds with no loads and extraordinarily low expenses. The funds are used by institutional investors and are not available to individual investors except through financial advisors, like us, who have been approved by DFA to use their funds. To learn more about Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA),
click here to go to their website.
Our Ongoing Commitment
Our world is constantly changing. The research is ongoing. Our ongoing commitment to our clients is to continue to engage the research, looking for new theories and insights that will enable us to better manage our clients’ portfolios, all with the ultimate objective of better enabling our clients to realize their personal financial goals.