“Every money manager has an investing philosophy that was built for good times, but that’s easy; a rising tide lifts every boat. Times like now are when advisors are forced to defend that philosophy, and sadly, many won’t be able to.” – Jeremy Torgerson, nVest Advisors CEO | May 8, 2022
Because of the economic and market challenges we’ve all experienced in 2022, investors are understandably worried about the security of their portfolios, and many looking for a new financial advisor relationship. This is common during periods of economic and market turmoil, as many clients find that the strategies their advisors chose for them ultimately didn’t work, and as your account value dropped, your advisor had no clear answer of what to do. As our account values fall for weeks or months, we’re often told by our advisor to “stay the course”, reminded that, “it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” and assured that, “time in the market is better than timing the market.”
While partially true, these kinds of platitudes tend to gloss over real concerns you may have about the direction of your investments, how your money is positioned for broad changes in economic conditions, how this market decline will affect your long-term goals, and ultimately, how your money is being managed.
So after getting no concrete answers and losing confidence, you go shopping for a new advisor, only to find that many of them merely have different ways to sell you the same strategy all over again.
At nVest Advisors, we take a completely different approach; one worth learning about and paying attention to as other advisors struggle to explain why your allegedly “safe” 50/50 or 60/40 portfolio fell almost as much as an account 100% invested in stocks did.
We build your investment portfolio based on today’s economy, not yesterday’s strategies.
We used to do it the way your advisor probably still does: we’d figure out your risk tolerance and put you in the right mix of stocks and bonds for someone your age and temperament. And then we’d tell you to “stay the course” and let your investments work over a long period of time.
There is some merit to traditional “buy and hold” strategies, mainly because it helps to eliminate common emotional mistakes investors (and their advisors) make with money. However, as many people painfully learned this year, “buy and hold” strategies and traditional risk models don’t always work.
We began to change our investment philosophy back in 2018 and fully converted our money management style in January 2022. Instead of traditional investment models placing you in the “appropriate” mix of asset classes and just letting the markets do their thing, we decided to focus first on what is happening in the real-world economy and making sure our clients are appropriately positioned for actual economic events as they happen.
Our new investing style is what we call data-dependent macroeconomic modeling. That sounds fancy, but what is means to you is that your investment portfolio is constantly evolving as the world’s economic conditions change. As your investment manager, we accept that there will always be some parts of the economy that are trending up and other parts that are trending down, and we shift your portfolio in real-time – in appropriate amounts – to capitalize on those fluctuations. We do this while actually lowering your daily volatility.
We believe the results speak for themselves. As of November 11, here is the actual performance of the nVest Advisors Macro Model (for clients with accounts custodied at TD Ameritrade) performing against the S&P 500 and a “safe” portfolio of 50% stocks and 50% bonds, over a one-year period:
nVest Advisors proprietary model performance chart (Nov 12, 2021 – Nov 11, 2022). Analysis performed by: Kwanti Analytics
We exclusively offer fiduciary and fee-only services, for every client.
Perhaps you’ve seen television commercials for Fisher Investments, a large registered investment advisory firm, that touts investment management services that do not pay commissions to your advisor, and that acts as a full legal fiduciary for their clients. We applaud Fisher’s basic approach and send a robust, “Hear, hear!” to our comrades in arms, taking on a deeply conflicted, and entrenched, industry.
We are also fully fiduciary and work with clients exclusively on a fee-only basis. This means we are motivated and aligned with you to grow your account, not to sell you products. And when your account goes down, our fee goes down. Working with you on an assets-under-management fee structure was, in our opinion, the most ethical way to do business with you. And in 2015, that’s exactly what we did.
The SEC and various state investment regulators want you to know about the Fiduciary Standard of Care companies like ours are voluntarily held to. These standards are much higher than the traditional “suitability standard” most financial adviors are held to.
We encourage you to learn the difference, and then, always ask any investment advisor you’re talking to whether or not they are a full legal fiduciary, and will they put that in writing? (We will.)
Young or old, wealthy or not yet wealthy, savvy or novice, we love all of our “nVestors”.
Unlike Fisher Investments, we don’t have a $500,000 minimum account size to work with us. In fact, we have no minimum account size at all, and have specifically designed programs to match your investment savvy and needed outcomes. If you’re just getting started and want to begin a ROTH IRA with your first $100, we can help you! If you’ve worked and saved for a lifetime, inherited a fortune, or sold your business and have many millions of dollars to invest for tax and estate considerations, we can do that, too. (We can even manage your company’s 401k, but that’s another story.)
We’re 100% virtual.
We were doing video meetings with our clients years before Covid made it necessary. At nVest Advisors, we value your time as much as we value your business, so we’ve structured our company to work with you; to come alongside your busy schedule and support you with virtual meetings you don’t have to leave work or home to attend, paperless account openings and e-signatures on everything. We even do business with you through text messaging and video email. Our job is to be available for you when you need us, not to make you become available for us.
Are you looking for a new advisor right now, or perhaps looking for your very first financial pro? Let’s talk! We’re happy to spend some time seeing if we’d be a good fit for your needs. Schedule a free visit and audit of your current investments today:
