The stock market fluctuates daily, but what you desire for your future is unlikely to change. Your investment plan is no different. In fact, investing is a lot like running a marathon. Our long-term goal is to win the race, but along the way we’ll need to adjust our speed and positioning based on conditions around us.
Fundamental & Qualitative Analysis
Is the economy growing or deteriorting? We monitor the macro backdrop to help understand opportunities and risks.
Trend
Trend following isn’t about market timing. It’s about riding the bullish trends for the bulk of big rallies and is primarily about avoiding riding a bear market all the way to the bottom fully invested.
Investment Sentiment
Sentiment is considered by many of the world’s most successful investors. All use remarkably different investment strategies, but they all consider extremes in investor psychology to be important inputs to their process.
Optimal Portfolio Design
We believe every portfolio should aim to combine all three to increase your odds of successful long term investing. And our process and strategy does this for our clients.
That’s why our investment approach relies on “risk management.” Risk management is the process of increasing or decreasing our market exposure and sector positioning based on the conditions around us. The conditions that we study are fundamental, technical and sentiment driven. Many portfolio managers only focus on one of those and we feel incorporating all three provides the most accurate picture of the market direction.
From the numerous studies we look at, we take a ‘weight of the evidence’ approach. Focusing on the weight of the evidence approach gives us the ability to remove emotion from our investment decision making process thereby giving us the clarity that our clients hired us for. Studies have shown the detriment emotional investing has had on portfolios.
Ultimately, your investment allocation will be directly tied to your financial plan with portfolio adjustments along the way. It is important to review these together on a routine basis to ensure that everything is on track and still aligned with your goals.