Investing

A unique approach

We pursue a broader investment experience guided by economic and financial science, and realized with advanced technological implementation of factors driving expected returns.

We work with the world's leading and money managers and research institutions through endowment-driven multiple asset class model portfolios with a global view, and seek enhanced expected returns through technological advances in econometrics, sampling, code, pipe and processing speed.

Working Together

We start with you, developing a personal relationship and understanding your goals, needs, risk profile and time horizon to guide all of our recommendations.

Importantly, our work together can help manage bias—the behavioral component to investment managing that may offer the potential for higher returns regardless of the most ingenious investment portfdolio. Informed by behavioral finance, some of our psychographic risk measurements can help anticipate and address such potential biases as loss aversion, the endowment effect, sunk cost fallacy, familiarity bias, status quo bias and the bandwagon effect.

Strategic and income model portfolios

All of our investment portfolios are custom designed, like you.

We use model strategic and income portfolios developed by State Street Global Adviser Investment Solutions Group (ISG), the same team that manages money for central banks, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and other large institutions.

"America, though many know it not, is one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped."
Vermont Royster

Dimensional Fund Advisors Investing

Dimensional leaders such as Nobel-prize winning Board Member Eugene Fama explain the deep connections between academic finance and its approach to investing, data and implementation.

Investment Management Fees

Annual investment and fee-based variable annuity management fees start at $2,750.

Our cumulative fee structure is tiered by asset level as follows:

Account Value
$0-$1,000,000
$1,000,001-$3,000,000

$3,000,001-$10,000,000

$10,000,001+

Advisory Fee
1.0%

.75%
.50%
.25%

Fee-only investment management

We are a fee-only investment variable annuity manager, never charging a commission.

We only work with money managers specifying investment expenses below 1% annually and never build an investment portfolio with an expense exceeding .4% annually.

We only work variable annuity carriers offering indexed fixed-income and equities and access to DFA funds specifying investment expenses below .5%, current mortality and expense charges below .5%, features easily understandable, and prospectuses with fewer than 200 pages.

We supplement our base model portfolios with endowment model components comprising alternative assets based on allocations developed with the BlackRock Research Institute and the Toronto-based alterative asset consultants AGF Management Limited. Our alternatives asset classes of real estate, commodities, infrastructure, hedge funds and gold seek to provide improved risk and return profiles through solutions that may perform differently than stocks and bonds over a market cycle.

Factor based investing

Depending on your risk profile and time-frame, we invest equity, real estate, hedge fund and commodity asset classes with factor-based investing

Grounded in economic theory and backed by decades of empirical research, certain factors have been identified to produce broad, persistent excess returns over long time periods. Multi-factor strategies can capture opportunities and also manage risk and volatility. Factor exposures can be managed to provide a smoother ride for investors across different sectors, regions and asset classes

We focus on such return drivers as value, size, profitability, momentum, carry, and roll with a variety of money managers.

Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA)

Our principal equity and real estate money manager is Dimensional Fund Advisors. Its decades-long experience in groundbreaking factor-based investing adapts as research evolves, and provides supreme value to our clients.

We feature Dimensional ETFs in our investment and variable annuity portfolios, and we have completed the advance training required to offer the firm's RIA-distributed mutual funds, such as its Continental and Vector approaches.

Index-based investing

Our approach to fixed income, infrastructure and gold investing is to seek diversification through our model portfolios is to defer income and minimize expense and turnover.

Custodians

We work with Schwab Institutional and Interactive Brokers, each aggregated daily with our AssumeSmart platform.