In a financial world where clients have become mere account numbers, and the new emphasis rests on mass-marketing investment products and gathering “Assets Under Management,” we continue to deliver the attentive personal service of a knowledgeable and dedicated family advisor.
We believe that we are better investors because of our heritage as advisors to families and the long-term perspective it requires, and we are better family advisors because we possess the deep understanding and experience of real-life, active investing.
I have a vivid memory from early in my career: sitting in an investment meeting in a Manhattan high-rise while two portfolio managers got into a heated exchange about an investment idea. One of them was doing his best to poke holes in the investment case, which is perfectly standard practice. Finally, he concluded his counter-argument saying: “Why wouldn’t the doorman just get it for you?”
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I wrote an early draft of this article in the first days of 2020. I had no way of knowing what a roller coaster ride awaits us on all fronts: health, economy, everyday life, and of course, investing. I chose to put some final touches, and share it with you now. We might have entered the second half of the year, but our visibility for the following 6-12 months hasn’t gotten much better, but maybe there is a solution to that.
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Some years ago, I advised my clients: “Never invest in something where you can’t lose money”. This was the time when investors were beginning to mistake market volatility for risk, (which has now become a habit) and financial marketing departments were obliging the hungry crowd with a multitude of mathematicians-created products that promised to make you money whether the market went up or down. Face you win, tails you don’t lose.
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Back in 1999, at the peak of the dot.com bubble, I wrote an article entitled “AOL, RCA and The Shape of History” (December 1999) and was inspired by the chart below, borrowed from that Thanksgiving’s issue of The New Yorker. It compared the 1920s bubble in the shares of RCA to the stock performance of AOL in the late 1990s.
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