Model Wealth Portfolios
MWP is an investment platform that offers portfolios from a variety of professional money managers, each of whom provides a specialized philosophy, process, and market outlook. These money managers follow well-defined, repeatable processes for building and managing portfolios, while considering the long-term risk-return expectations for the investments they include and employing sophisticated screening methods to narrow the universe of investment options.
Several of these managers are institutional strategists who build portfolios for large foundations or endowment funds. In many cases, individual investors can only access these strategists through million-dollar-plus investments. With MWP, you get access to these institutional strategists through a starting investment minimum as low as $25,000. We work with these managers in MWP to create a customized investment strategy designed to address your specific needs.
Step 1: Clarify Your Goals
The first step in building your MWP strategy is determining what you want to accomplish with your investment plan. We’ll help you figure out what you hope to achieve from your investments, whether that’s saving for a child’s college education, working toward a large purchase, or planning for retirement. Together, we’ll come up with an end objective that will guide our strategist selection.
Step 2: Determine Your Risk Profile
Once we know what you hope to accomplish, the next step is figuring out how you feel about investing. Using our online Risk Profile, we help determine the level of risk that you are willing to take and see how it matches your current portfolio.
Step 3: Select an Investment Style
We work with you to determine which investment style is appropriate for your specific goals and the current market conditions. The two primary investment style options are strategic and tactical investing.
Strategic investing allows you to stay fully invested in a steady asset allocation model using a traditional buy-and-hold investment philosophy. Your asset allocation would be based on the manager’s long term market outlook and would not change much due to market fluctuations.
Tactical investing attempts to take advantage of short-term market fluctuations to find opportunities for larger gains. In this case, your asset allocation would be based on a shorter time frame and change more often as a result of the market’s movements. Because more trading occurs in tactical investing, we would have to consider the tax impact of this type of strategy. There are a wide variety of tactical investment management styles, which we’ll discuss when it’s time to look at the models best suited for you.
We can also choose to combine strategic and tactical models if it makes sense for you and your objectives.
Step 4: Define Your Investment Strategy
The last major piece of the portfolio puzzle is your overall investment strategy. Based on your goals, risk tolerance, and preferred investment style, we will determine the appropriate core investment strategy for your situation:
- Capital Appreciation – Prioritizes long-term gains over short-term gains
- Income Generation – Prioritizes current income over long-term gains
- Risk Aware – Prioritizes the preservation of assets you’ve already accumulated
Your investment strategy is the main objective we will work toward as we construct your portfolio and each time we review your account. Rather than comparing your account’s performance with the financial markets, we’ll examine whether or not your portfolio is tracking with its stated goal.
For example, if we determine your investment strategy should be capital appreciation—to slowly grow your account over the long term rather than reach for big spikes in account value in the short term—we would expect to see a gradual increase in your account’s value. Even if the market has large increases, it might not make sense for your account to follow suit in this case.
We also have the option of adding a diversifier strategy to complement your core strategy. These would be niche or alternative strategies that respond to market conditions differently than the core offerings and could be used if your current situation, preferences, and goals call for them.
There’s no guarantee that the MWP portfolios will achieve their stated investment objectives. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal.
Step 5: Select Strategists and Model
Your investment objective and preferred investment style will help narrow down the strategists and models that will work for you. We will research the strategists and models that fit with your goals, and select those we think are appropriate for your situation.
We also have the ability to combine multiple strategists or models to provide additional diversification and create the optimal portfolio for you. If you have any specific requests or needs that call for it, we can customize your portfolio further by adding models that focus on providing tax management, access to non-traditional investment strategies, additional income, or socially responsible investments. The end result will be a portfolio customized for you and designed to work toward your individual goals.
With our assistance and guidance, MWP can help you work toward realizing your goals through an asset management strategy that provides a disciplined investment process backed by comprehensive resources and experienced strategists. To learn more, get in touch with us today.
