How our investment strategies are different from traditional investment advisors

Active vs. Passive management of your investment portfolio --
Have you seen your investment advisor lately?

Most investment advisors will work out an investment plan for you in the form of a traditional asset allocation strategy. The investment advisor will typically set fixed investment allocations and establish a diversified approach to manage overall portfolio risk. The average investment advisor will expect to refresh the plan about once a year.

• This traditional kind of passive investment advice tends to ignore changing market conditions, or at the very least, their advice responds very slowly to changes.

By contrast, our investment strategies are active. Confident Strategies’® investment models quickly identify changing market conditions and respond by shifting allocations within an overall diversified portfolio strategy.

A different approach to portfolio risk management.

The passive style of investment advice provided by most diversified investment advisors cannot respond easily to changing market conditions.  Such an investment advisor has only one primary tool with which to manage the overall risk level of your portfolio to a reasonable level— reducing your portfolio's allocation of stocks and stock mutual funds.  The advisor will tell you:  “No more than 40% in stocks … or 60% in stocks.”  And, his investment advice will seek to invest the remainder of your portfolio in a diversified mix of less risky assets such as bonds, CD’s and money market accounts.

• Since a traditional investment advisor can’t or won’t tell you when to get into or out of the market, their advice can only help you manage risk over the long-haul by reducing the fixed, percentage allocation of your portfolio in stocks.

By contrast, our investment strategies manage risk with a long-term market timing model based upon time-proven statistics.  Our Model Portfolios do know when to get in and out of the market.  Market timing can reduce portfolio risk by responding quickly to stock market trend changes. 

• When stocks are trending up strongly, our stock market allocations will be very high to exploit the superior earnings potential of stocks.

Yet, our market timing based Model Portfolio strategies will quickly reduce their stock market allocation, or even eliminate it, when the trend turns bearish.  And unlike most investment advisors, our strategies incorporate strict stop loss techniques to help protect you against significant loss.

Objective decisionmaking that is independent, methodical and disciplined.

The mechanical investment models that drive our strategies eliminate the element of human emotion in decision-making. Their statistical measures and mathematical logic are not swayed by the biases of Wall Street advisors or by advice following the current fashions in "conventional wisdom."

• Our objectively-based strategies make it easy for you to be methodical in your investment management and maintain discipline.

However, before following any of our generic strategies, it is your responsibility to determine their suitability for your particular financial situation. Even though most financial advisors will be inclined to orient you toward a traditional investment strategy, we still recommend that you consult with a licensed investment advisor to help you determine if any of our strategies might be suitable for your individual situation and how best to incorporate any generic strategy into your overall portfolio allocation.

We Incorporate Hedging, Sector Plays and Global Opportunities--

All within a diversified format.

Some of our investment strategies provide a hedging capability that reduces overall portfolio risk and creates the opportunity to make money in bear markets. Very few investment advisors can do this.

An additional strength of our Model Portfolios is that they help you take advantage of specific sector plays within a diversified portfolio format.

• Following our investment strategies, you can nimbly take advantage of SmallCap stocks when they’re strong ... and at other times switch into the relative safety of LargeCap stocks.

• Sometimes our Model Portfolios will switch into International stocks ... for those times when International stocks are performing better than our U.S. stock market.

Remember ... the advice of the traditional investment advisor is "static"--or stuck in time. A traditional advisor can only incorporate hedging, sector plays and global opportunities by including them up-front as a fixed asset allocation within your diversified portfolio. The advisor can't tell you when to get in or out of these alternative types of investments. And, in all likelihood, if the advisor does include one or more of these alternatives, they will be included as a very small percentage which will dilute their ability to affect your portfolio in a meaningful way.