INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT
Investment Management
Academic Investment Approach
Investing and emotions - what's the connection? More than you might think. When markets are booming, greed can take over, and when there's a market correction, fear can set in.
These emotions often drive investors to make hasty decisions that can negatively impact their long-term investment gains, resulting in billions of dollars lost by investors as a whole.
At Capital Wealth Group, our mission is to discourage emotional decisions by our clients. While it's tempting to jump on the latest Wall Street craze, it's not the best way to help you achieve your goals.
Instead, our investment philosophy is rooted in time-tested principles that are widely accepted in academic circles and the investment profession.
We steer clear of emotion, stock picking, market timing, and investment fads and focus instead on your unique risk tolerance, need for income, and time horizon. Our personalized investment strategies feature a diversified approach and serve as a road map to help you achieve your objectives. By following this approach, we can help you make informed decisions that will lead to long-term success.
Proven Strategies to Increase Your Likelihood of Success
At Capital Wealth Group, we take a different approach to investing. Our philosophy is rooted in academic findings from the past 70 years, and we plan to continue following these principles in the future. We don't buy into the Wall Street marketing machine. Instead, we are guided by a few key theories: Efficient-Market Hypothesis (EMH), Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) and proven "Factor" investing.
EMH, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, argues that it's impossible to consistently "beat the market." All publicly available information is already reflected in the value of any asset, making it highly unlikely to uncover consistently undervalued stocks or predict market trends. Therefore, we believe that searching for these undervalued stocks, predicting market trends, and timing strategies are pointless.
MPT considers the relationship between risk and return when designing overall investment strategies to achieve the most favorable portfolio performance. We create individual portfolios based on each investor's risk level, maximizing expected return for that level of risk. MPT is widely accepted throughout the world as the gold standard for sensible diversification.
Factor Investment approach draws upon the work of Nobel laureates and financial economists, including Eugene Fama (University of Chicago), and Kenneth French (Dartmouth). Professors Fama and French are academic leaders whose breakthrough theories challenged and changed the practical world of modern investing by examining the behavior of markets, the relationship between capital structure and firm value, and the common risk factors in stock and bond returns. Among other things, their research demonstrates that holding the market and over-weighting portfolio exposure to value stocks, small cap stocks, and stocks with recent strong price momentum and strong profitability growth offers more attractive expected returns than most active investment managers or advisors over the long-run
Our approach is to create a personalized investment strategy that is diversified across multiple asset classes, minimizing fees and transaction costs, and maximizing your after-tax returns. By following proven academic principles, your portfolio has a higher likelihood of success over trading-intensive and fad-chasing approaches promoted by Wall Street. We want to help you achieve your long-term investment goals, and we believe that our approach is the best way to do so.
Our Customized Investment Portfolios: Mitigating Risk and Maximizing Returns for Your Unique Circumstances
Key principles we follow to help protect & grow your nest egg:
1.) Keep costs low - Use Low Cost Diversified ETF's
The best predictor of future returns is the cost of your investments. In other words, low-cost investments are expected to provide better returns than high-cost investments.
For that reason, we build our retirement portfolios using diversified low-cost index funds like Vanguard, Schwab, and Dimensional funds. This helps to improve the success rate of your retirement plan and reduce unnecessary risk.
2.) Own tax-efficient investments - Low-turnover, Use tax-loss harvesting & Asset Location
Warren Buffet famously proclaimed that his favorite holding period is "forever", and we could not agree more. While it is not always practical, especially for retirees, to buy an investment and hold it indefinitely, we do strive to create portfolios with low turnover.
Every time an investment is bought or sold (i.e "turned over"), costs are incurred. These costs are not only obvious, such as transaction fees and taxes, but also hidden, such as bid-ask spreads.
These costs have the potential to eat away at your investment returns. To protect your returns and minimize taxes, we target investments with low turnover. When we do need to sell investments, such as for rebalancing or income needs, we employ tax-loss harvesting to minimize the tax burden.
Another often overlooked strategy by many Advisors that will help minimize taxes and maximize aftert-tax returns is called Asset Location. In general, you want to put a larger percentage of tax-efficient investments such as equity ETF's and tax-free bonds in taxable accounts and a higher percentage of bond ETF's and taxable bonds in tax-deferred accounts.
3.) Own the right asset classes & Rebalance
Not all investments are created equal. Just because you can invest your money into something, does not mean you should.
We only invest in asset classes that:
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Have been proven through academic research to provide superior risk-adjusted returns
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Work well when invested together in a diversified portfolio (e.g. low and/or negative correlation to each other)
As a fiduciaries, our job is to make investment decisions that are in your best interest. This means ignoring the daily headlines and sticking with evidence-based solutions.
Want to learn more about creating income in retirement? Schedule a complementary call.
