Our standalone clients receive our Investment Analysis services. For these clients, we develop investment recommendations for a client’s portfolio that they can implement themself if they choose to do so. We do not carry out transactions or complete paperwork for the client’s transactions as part of our investment analysis service.
Along with making recommendations for clients’ personal portfolios, we also develop recommendations for employee benefit accounts like 401(k)s that we will help the client to implement.
Investment analysis is much less involved than our investment management service in which we implement recommendations on behalf of the client. This is the suitable plan for someone who doesn’t mind doing paperwork and carrying out trades on their own. We will still help with making changes, but we won’t constantly monitor a client’s accounts.
What do we consider when making recommendations?
- Risk Tolerance – Each client has a different tolerance for risk, we build account allocations based on the client’s risk tolerance score.
- Timeline – In the case of retirement, we generally recommend a more conservative portfolio as the client gets closer to retiring. This is the same with other goals, as a client approaches the time that they plan to reach a goal, we generally recommend less risk.
What do we invest in?
- ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) – For most clients, we generally recommend investing in ETFs instead of individual stocks and bonds because they provide exposure to more diversity and spread risk across several companies at a low cost.
- Passive index funds – We typically recommend investing in passively managed funds because of their lower cost as compared to actively managed ones.
- Vanguard Core ETFs – We like to stick to the core Vanguard funds. The Vanguard Total US Stock Index (VTI), Vanguard Total International Stock Index (VXUS) and Vanguard Total Bond Market Index (BND) are most commonly used in the accounts we manage because of their low cost and broad exposure to a variety of sectors.
