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Financial Planning
Financial planning is an essential step toward achieving financial goals, because it requires identifying and prioritizing goals, taking stock of personal resources, examining views about risk and return, and taking action. Good financial plans are like clear roadmaps that help you reach your destination more quickly and easily.
Our financial plans are tailored to your specific situation. They contain observations, analyses and recommendations that you can act upon. They are "living" documents that should be updated periodically to reflect changes in the markets and your personal situation.
Portfolio Management
We believe that long-term investment performance is determined primarily by asset allocation (the amount invested in stocks vs. bonds vs. other asset classes) and, to a lesser extent, by factors such as diversification (spreading investment dollars across multiple dissimilar assets to avoid excessive exposure to a single asset), expenses (mutual fund fees, trading commissions, etc.), tax efficiency (effectively managing investor tax concerns), market timing (determining when to buy and sell), and security selection (identifying individual stocks/bonds to outperform the market). At Altius, we focus on asset allocation, diversification, expenses and tax efficiency because we have more control over them. We generally do not attempt to time the market because we think that cannot be done effectively over the long haul. Similarly, we do not favor selecting individual stocks because we feel it is difficult to pick tomorrow's winners consistently.
We focus on designing portfolios that allocate assets efficiently across a number of asset classes. We use a wide variety of asset classes ranging from large cap US equities and emerging market equities to commodities, inflation-linked bonds and international bonds. We build portfolios by combining low-cost, tax-efficient, indexed mutual funds and ETFs (exchange traded funds) with actively-managed mutual funds that aim to outperform the indexes. We use a variety of criteria in selecting actively-managed funds including reputation of the fund manager and the fund company, track record, risk level, investment approach, costs, tax-efficiency, size of portfolio and rate of growth of assets under management.
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