AMS Investment Style
So what is our investment style at Asset Management Strategies? We found that our clients are far more interested in protecting against losses in their principal values than they are in maximizing the gains that they can get from their portfolio management. We employ what is kind of a marriage between modern portfolio theory, trend following, and behavioral finance. Modern portfolio theory is the academic theory of investing based on an efficient market theory. Trend following says that we look at just the price movement of assets as they go through the markets and behavioral finance says what's the human interaction that people have with all that information. Our strategy is that we want to advance the portfolios in good markets and then we want to protect those valuations in bad markets. The way we do this is that we look at filtering all of the different universe of investment choices that we have between stocks and bonds and mutual funds and exchange traded funds, all of those different choices we want to look at to compose the portfolios that we use. We filter those down. We look for things that have identifiable trend patterns that we think will repeat and we look for things that are representing major asset classes. We don't want to take risks with individual stocks. We want to have a whole market behind what we invest in. We look at allocating each portfolio between how much we have in fixed income and how much we have in equity. The reason that we have fixed income in the portfolio is for safety, not for performance. The performance should come, and historically has come, on the equity side. So we want to focus as much as we can on the equity side because that drives performance but we have to be able to protect as much as we can with the fixed income. So it's a careful balance between the fixed income and the equity side and we have different portfolios, different models that we prescribe for different situations for each individual person. We look at the breakdown of these portfolios on a weekly basis. We evaluate that to see if we need to make changes. If we do, we make those changes but it could be weeks or even months that we don't make any changes in the portfolio if those trends are going in the direction that we want them to. At the end of the day, the bottom line is absolute performance and we have to perform. We have to do what we say we're going to do and if that means giving you market returns, we're going to be able to provide that as far as the strategies that we use. Hope that answers your questions about how we go about doing what we do. Please call us if you have any other thoughts or questions beyond that. Thanks.