The first step in building a successful investment program is establishing ground rules. We help you design an Investment Policy Statement (IPS) that spells out the reason you have a portfolio in the first place, your expectations of performance, the roles of stakeholders, and the methods by which we will invest. We conduct an asset allocation study to figure out which combination of asset classes best fits your specific risk and return parameters. That allocation is incorporated into the IPS to guide our investment decisions and provide a measuring stick to evaluate performance.

Next, we build a portfolio that best fits your timeline, risk profile and return expectations. We also select a custodian to hold assets, record and settle transactions, receive interest and dividends and perform accounting functions. We never hold client assets ourselves. Your account is your account. Should you decide to leave, your account remains yours.

From that point we monitor the portfolio and provide monthly and/or quarterly activity and performance reports.  For those who cannot wait, we provide online access to view (but not change) investments daily. We meet with you regularly, generally quarterly but at least twice a year, to review performance, update any changes to objectives, and provide fiduciary and investment education to boards and investment committees.

We only invest on a discretionary basis, meaning we choose the investment managers and rebalance as we see fit. Why do we do this?   We do not want to take up valuable time, either yours or ours, trying to convince you of the merits of a particular manager when it makes such a small difference to the overall portfolio.   It is our experience that boards and committees struggle to make manager hiring and firing decisions, either by allowing emotional responses to current markets to overwhelm discipline, or postponing the decision, or just accepting the recommendation of the consultant without conducting sufficient due diligence of their own. Doing any of these increases the risk to you, the committee and/or board member, of breaching fiduciary duties. We would rather share the responsibility and use our extensive investing processes and experience to help you achieve your goals.