Portfolio Design
Warren Buffet, Benjamin Graham, Sir John Templeton, Harry Markoitz, and others…
Some of the great names of investing today and through time all have one thing in common: they have a system, a plan for investing and building wealth… and they stick with it. Some years are great, others maybe not. They know their system, and over time it tends to work in their favor. Do you have a system?
In order to drive wealth, you need a system or a plan to build wealth. We use ideas and methodologies which have been tested through time, eliminate emotion, and stick to a game plan in order to design portfolios to optimize returns and balance the ups and downs of the market. Our safe investment options minimize the risk of investing with the potential for reward based on your stated goals.
At AmericasRetirementPlan.com, we utilize a proprietary strategy used by our company for more than 20 years to find the optimum performing funds and put them to work in a well-coordinated portfolio. We then perform ongoing monitoring and re-balancing to make sure your portfolio is on track.
We start by determining global economic conditions based on a broad, top down approach. Where are the opportunities? What countries are doing well and which one’s are not? What sectors and index’s are performing well and which ones have the potential to turn around. We use worldwide global data collection, fundamental results and technical analysis in order to point us in the right direction to give a forward looking view of what’s in the future.
We then sort through thousands of mutual funds or Exchange Traded Funds based on the objective, pinpointing management with long-term track records of success, generally at least ten years.
We then identify risk measures such as Standard Deviation and Beta that fit within our guidelines to keep risk down while creating an environment to compliment returns.
By adding long/short strategies, we try to further mitigate risk on the downside and take advantage of upside markets. This is a strategy few, if any, internet-only investment advisors use as most are only index fund driven.
Exchange Traded Funds
ETFs generally target an indexing strategy and are very useful in building portfolios which may be very low-cost and efficient with regard to goal selection. They are not managed internally with regard to maximizing their objective, but often this still works in their favor.
For portfolios exceeding $5,000, they may be allocated and managed in a very tax-efficient manner. We bring you selections of ETFs, which are traded at no cost, monitored for efficiency, and re-balanced two to four times per year in order to create the best tax benefits possible. ETFs may also be used well as trading vehicles, but we do not utilize them in this manner. Due to their construction as following an index, most ETFs have a wide variety of securities within them that target that specific index.
Mutual Funds
Mutual funds are pooled investment companies where the main goal is to hire the appropriate manager, or team of managers, in order to select securities to be managed in order to reach a specific goal. Unlike ETFs, which usually target an indexing strategy and how we employ them for our clients, mutual funds may try to find the best securities to target the specific objective: growth, income or preservation. It’s been said that the problem with mutual funds is that approximately 80 percent don’t reach their goals…but what about the other 20,10 or even the top 5% percent?
Our objective is to consistently locate funds in the upper 5 percent of mutual funds based on our research, which offer the lowest internal fees and may be included in allocated portfolios with no trading fees. These funds often tend to be highly rated by Morningstar or Lipper.
Portfolios of $25 to $5,000 are designed using mutual funds as growth instead of tax consequences being the most important objective while portfolios over $1,000 may be designed with ETFs or Mutual Funds based on the need for growth, income, tax efficiency and or preservation.
