We divide a family’s whole financial picture into different risk categories called “buckets”. Families with identical nets worth can easily face completely different exposures and opportunities pertaining to things like income, insurance, inheritances. For example, a divorcee with kids faces a different set of circumstances than an “empty-nester” CEO. Our job is to identify which buckets are over or under filled and work to harmonize them. As such, we ensure strategic consistency across all financial endeavors, from investing to budgeting to philanthropy and estate planning. We view your financial plan as a living document that prescribes an investment strategy, a career strategy and more. We believe that a financial strategy supports client’s life goals, not the other way around.

Our investment approach: by Dana Grigg

Amongst the most important investing decisions are asset allocation, asset location and asset selection. Cost minimization and tax efficiency come next. All of these are areas over which the investor has control, and these are the areas I work very hard to optimize. The question of which markets are likely to outperform in the future is far less controllable. For each client, I craft a unique, customized approach beginning with an overall strategy. I use an asset allocation based approach built on the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) combined with some of my own assumptions, experience, data, etc. I have years of experience with this methodology. Not only was it pioneered (in its advanced form) by members of the Stanford finance department (my alma mater), I have been applying it since 1991 (back then, as an analyst at Credit Suisse in Zurich, Switzerland). A basic rule of finance is that all assets are risky and that means that you can lose money no matter where you put it (even cash gets devastated by inflation). So they key is to manage risk not to reach for short term returns. Therefore our focus is risk measurement and risk management.

I am a globally focused passive-oriented equity investor. The opposite of a speculator, a passive investor believes markets are generally efficient and therefore, it is best to diversify broadly to hedge against event risk. We tend to utilize index-based products and focus on relative returns. We appreciate the risk-reward benefits offered by emerging markets and even G-7 countries. Passive investing tends to be a long-term approach and is not suited for those who have little patience or short time horizons. In the tortoise and the hare metaphor, a passive investor might be the tortoise that wins the race. I am very strong at fixed income (bond) investing and utilize individual bonds to manage liquidity and interest rate/inflation exposure.

For an asset to enter a client’s portfolio, it has to be on our “approved list” which is a set of assets for which we have done extensive due diligence and believe are the best in their class. My firm is approved by Dimensional Fund Advisors to invest in their funds which are normally limited to institutional investors and I sometimes use their funds to achieve certain “tilts” within portfolios.

I am focused on maximizing returns after taxes and fees. This adds further layer of analysis where under we screen investment choices, brokerages and custodians for the best cost-benefit mix for our clients.

To maximize investment returns in an after-tax context, rather than just looking at tickers and quantities, we track clients’ assets by tax lot and can identify the embedded short term and long term capital gains down to the individual share level. As a consequence, we are able to deploy liquidation strategies that fit our clients’ tax planning strategies.

I encourage my clients to look at relative returns, not just absolute returns, and also to consider their performance within the context of their financial plan: where do they stand relative to where they had planned?