Investment Management
Overview
We believe that investing is an important tool needed to help clients achieve their Passionate Life™.
Our Discover, Design and Direct collaborative approach to investing identifies your priorities. Then, together we create a personalized strategy that aligns your money and personal aspirations to help you achieve your Passionate Life™.
To accomplish this, we take a unique approach.
We believe that effective investing requires A) trade-offs, B) evolving flexibility and C) avoiding making emotional decisions.
A. Trade-Offs
Trade-offs requires clients to determine their priorities. These might include:
- keeping costs low
- capturing upside performance
- managing tax implications
- protection from a bad market
B. Evolving Flexibility
Evolving flexibility is important since no two market environments are identical. We must be able to make adjustments to our strategy, while still maintaining a consistent overall framework.
C. Avoiding Making Emotional Decisions
Perhaps most importantly, making emotional decisions and veering away from a sound strategy is one of the biggest reasons why people will not achieve their Passionate Life™. The theoretical difference between an investment return and an actual investor return is known as the Behavior Gap.
Investment Process
Once we have determined your Passions and Priorities™ and identified what your Passionate Life™ looks like, we can develop an evolving portfolio strategy. In our design, we incorporate the objective needs from the Evolve Wealth Management System™ and its Optimal Life Index™, as well as the subjective, or behavioral predictions (Emotional Factor™)). All of these are important in attempting to create a strategy that clients will stick to – and believe in.
Further, we incorporate our basic investment philosophies into each of our individualized client investment portfolios.
- Utilize a systematic approach to investing, in order to minimize the possible damage arising from making emotional decisions.
- Employ active risk management strategies that may employ larger cash positions and non-traditional investments, as determined by then current market conditions.
- Implement a globally diversified structure that may hold disparate positions in U.S. and international equities, commodities, bonds, real estate and/or other alternative assets or investment vehicles.
- Invest in low cost ETFs and mutual funds, whenever possible.
While our competitors often use buy and hold asset allocations from the 1980s, or earlier, our strategies evolve as market conditions change. We use certain market indicators, such as momentum, trend and relative strength measurements to help us adjust our allocations. These adjustments may minimize losses during challenging market conditions, or potentially maximize gains when traditional asset classes are not performing well.
We view our investment process as a combination of effective, well researched and flexible portfolio strategies. These are combined with assessments and procedures designed to keep clients engaged and on track, even during difficult market downturns.
IMPORTANT: That is not to say that clients are insulated from losses, however, our focus is to minimize losses to the degree possible. Mathematically, larger losses may have a more profound impact on achieving one’s goals than maximizing gains. Talk with us and we’ll explain why.