We don’t think we can beat the market, nor do we try to.  We focus on the drivers of investment returns that we do control:  taxes, fees, liquidity, exposure to market risk, and exposure to inflation.

Our approach to investing seeks to balance the risks in your investment portfolio with the risks in the rest of your life.  In developing our recommendations, we focus first on understanding your goals and priorities; then we consider what you do for a living, your health, your current and future family structure, whether you have insurance or other risk management strategies in place, and what assets and liabilities you have today.  This helps us tailor your investment strategy to your specific needs.

If you choose to delegate day-to-day investment decisions to us, we will invest your accounts in a diversified portfolio of mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and publicly-traded securities based on your goals, preferences, and current situation.  Before executing any trades, we would agree on a target asset allocation based on your willingness and ability to accept market risk.  By setting a strategy in advance and taking responsibility for implementation, we believe we help our clients avoid emotionally-driven decisions as markets fluctuate.

Our investment strategies are customized to each client’s situation; we do not use off-the-shelf model portfolios.  We find most of our clients come to us with unrealized capital gains or other constraints that require a more tailored approach than model portfolios provide.

We seek to implement each client’s investment strategy with a view toward long-term tax efficiency.  We choose the optimal location for each asset across the client’s taxable and tax-advantaged accounts.  We trade infrequently and, when we do, we look to minimize the tax consequences, often by focusing trading in tax-advantaged accounts.  In taxable accounts, we look for opportunities for tax-loss harvesting (selling individual holdings at a loss) and tax-gain harvesting (increasing the tax basis of holdings when advantageous).

We carefully manage liquidity so clients can access the funds they need while seeking to increase yield on funds they will not need to access in the near-to-medium term.

Consistent with our investment philosophy, we use broadly-diversified, low-cost exchange-traded funds and mutual funds as building blocks for our client portfolios, including products from Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.  Our discretionary client accounts are held in custody by TD Ameritrade Institutional.

Non-Discretionary Investment CONSULTING

We can help you source, evaluate and manage private investments, such as closely held businesses, angel investments, private equity funds, and hedge funds.   We do not manage private investments on a discretionary basis.

Real estate

We can help you evaluate, execute and manage real estate investments, including direct investments (e.g., buying an apartment building), syndicated deals (e.g., joining a partnership to acquire or develop real estate), and lending (e.g., providing capital to a developer in exchange for a fixed rate of return).  We do not manage real estate investments on a discretionary basis.

Click here to learn more about our investment management fees.