Investment Philosophy: Diversification

All clients have a core portfolio of individual stocks diversified by sector and market capitalization:

• Sector diversification ensures that portfolios include a balance of stocks in key areas such as consumer cyclicals, consumer staples, energy, financials, healthcare, industrials and technology.  This balance limits portfolio volatility that could result from excessive sector concentration.
• Diversification by market capitalization ensures a balance between small, medium and large-sized companies and similarly limits volatility of returns.

Clients’ core portfolios can be augmented to create a fully diversified portfolio, including:

• additional asset classes such as fixed income, real estate, commodities, currencies and other diversifiers and
• stock exposure in categories not fully captured by the Sustainable Value strategy, such as emerging markets, international and growth.
• These complementary holdings generally consist of mutual funds and ETFs, but may also include individual bonds for larger accounts.
• We emphasize out-of-favor sectors and contrarian managers.

Our investment philosophy helps guide clients through changing markets.

Stocks at the Core

We believe that putting stocks at the core of an investment portfolio provides the ideal foundation for achieving long term financial goals and objectives.

Diversification

We believe that diversification is an essential element of risk management.  Diversifying portfolios applies within and across asset classes.

Disciplined Process

We believe in a disciplined investment process that minimizes emotion.  We believe that adhering rigorously to this process can improve long-term results.

Contrarian Investing

We believe that capital markets are frequently dominated by short-term thinking and a herd instinct.  These tendencies create opportunities for investors who take the long view.