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Institutional & Endowment Models: We strongly believe that individual investment allocations should employ the techniques, tools, and knowledge of institutional strategies whenever possible. Strategy Diversification: We believe that asset allocation is the most important determinant of a portfolio’s risk and return over time. We design globally diversified portfolios that cover the major asset classes of domestic and international equities, fixed income, and alternative investments. We then utilize a variety of disciplined, well-researched strategies to navigate the different asset classes to develop a true global macro portfolio. Independent Thinking: We believe that the most effective investment approach is through independent, objective thinking. We are an independent firm employed by our clients. Our independence allows us to seek out best-in-class investments. Capital Preservation: We believe our job is to protect and build your wealth. We do this by identifying short and long-term risks, and then designing strategic and tactical portfolios to prudently manage these risks in order to preserve capital today and grow your assets in the future. We use our global tactical approach because it emphasizes risk management. We also want to minimize the negative impacts of expenses, taxes, and inflation. We are committed in identifying strategies that can significantly improve the chances of the success of your long-term financial plan. Pundit Predictions: The future is impossible to predict with any degree of precision. It is important to have adaptive, tactical, dynamic, unconstrained strategies as a portion of your overall allocation. Growth vs. Risk: While earning a competitive or even superior rate of return is nearly universally desirable, managing risk exposure is the most important consideration in portfolio design. Trend Following: Trends can persist for extended time periods until they change, often dramatically. Using different tools to identify these trends, our goal is to participate in the upside of the trends…

After our initial “discovery” meeting, our follow up meeting will often include an investment plan. We strongly support an institutional endowment style of portfolio construction versus a traditional retail asset allocation. We promote an allocation of strategies coupled with non-traditional investments to reduce daily market volatility. When constructing an allocation, we use different strategies to work in different market environments, with the ultimate goal of increasing our clients’ net worth year over year, despite the market trends. Beyond the traditional investments, there are a tremendous amount of non-traditional and alternative investment opportunities to add diversity to your allocation. Most people do not want to get caught up in a bear market or have a down year. While there are no straight lines in investing, using various methods and concepts to build a portfolio, our objective is to increase our clients’ assets year after year, while managing risk and mitigating volatility.Our portfolios are constructed to be dynamic, flexible, and globally diversified with exposure to many different market segments, asset classes, and investment vehicles. Over time, we believe that expenses, taxes, and inflation can have negative impact on your portfolio. We are committed to eliminating unnecessary investment costs and identifying tax savings strategies that can significantly improve the chances of the success of your long-term financial plan. For taxable accounts, it’s important to minimize tax consequences. While our investment allocations are not solely based on tax implications, tax consequences are taken into consideration in the design of your portfolio. Based on your extensive personal profile, we will prepare a no obligation, personalized investment proposal, explaining the various concepts and methodologies that go into its construction. For more information, please contact Scott Brooks at 949.545.6500.

My Endowment Model: Endowment Approach Portfolios for your Household When the equity markets are going up, everything is great. But when they go down, they can certainly test an investor’s tolerance for volatility. In our unique and thoughtful style of portfolio construction, we often refer to the college endowment allocations (Yale, Harvard, Stanford) for portfolio design concepts. While most traditional investment institutions will recommend some blend of stocks and bonds based on your investor profile (age, risk, objectives, etc.), they are often limited in their investment opportunities for their clients. It’s your hard-earned money and you want it to grow and you want to sleep at night. If you take a look at what the college endowments, high net worth family offices, pensions, institutions, and others that have very large amounts of money invested, they are not simply in stocks and bonds. As you probably know, they are in direct real estate, direct private equity and debt, venture capital, professional managed strategies and hedge funds, natural resources, and more. As a well-known example, you can review Yale University’s most recent Endowment Update. If the brightest minds that were hired to manage billions of dollars have only a fraction of their investable assets in stocks and bonds, why should you? We distinguish ourselves from many others in our industry with our portfolio design, as we look to emulate the large endowment models for our clients and their households. We still utilize professionally managed strategies in stocks and bonds, but we also look to complement the liquid and often more volatile portion of the portfolio with direct real estate, private lending, private equity, and more. Of course liquidity needs, risk tolerance, and your objectives will determine how the portfolio is custom tailored to you. The university endowments and high net worth family…