Investment Beliefs and Strategies
While our primary goal at JLS Wealth Management is navigating your life's goals and ambitions we realize that the only way to achieve these is through a sound investment management philosophy.
Our investment approach is grounded in long-term fundamentals with adjustments for today's markets. We base our investment philosophy and strategies on four key principles about markets and how they typically behave:
What it means for our clients: While we believe that overall markets and individuals securities are mostly efficient, they are not perfect. The price of stocks tends to be exaggerated on both the upside and the downside of markets. The main reason for this is that investors are human and bring emotions into their decision-making calculus (greed and fear are two of the most powerful emotions). This is good news for our clients because this creates potentially profitable opportunities for those that attempt to remove emotion from their decision-making calculus.
We monitor your accounts so we can avoid the same emotional decisions that others are making, while at the same time making adjustments to potentially take advantage of other investor's emotionally based decisions.
What it means for our clients: There is a vast universe of investment products that claim to invest in similar fashion to one another. Even though these investments have similar names, they allocate the investment dollars inside of them in vastly different manners. Some are market weighted (give more investment dollars to larger companies), some are equal weighted (gives equal investment dollars to each stock which tends to favor smaller companies, since there are more of them) and some are fundamentally based (they have their own private matrix they follow).
We navigate this complex field of investments to determine the exact investment that best fits within the allocation we are currently employing.
What it means for our clients: Most investment advisors structure client accounts around style boxes (Growth Verse Value, Large verse Small companies) and plug investments in regardless of the macroeconomic, political, and social indicators. We take a look at macro level ideas and develop themes for investment ideas. Some examples include: US energy independence, equity buy-back programs, rising interest rates, U.S. verse International Fiscal Policy, etc.
At JLS Wealth Management we look at what type of investments work the best under what conditions and make adjustments to your allocation based upon those factors rather than trying to plug a “hole” in your account.
What it means for our clients: We rank managing risk for clients as a higher priority than managing levels of return. If a client cannot handle a certain level of volatility in the short-term, then they will make decisions that negatively impact their long-term returns. This chart details the level of return you need to gain to be back at breakeven on returns:
Percent Negative | Percent Needed to get back to even |
-10% | 11% |
-20% | 25% |
-25% | 33% |
-33% | 50% |
-50% | 100% |
Clearly by attempting to limit the negative returns in accounts investors can be better able to participate in the upside more quickly. By being contrarian and monitoring and adjusting accounts as needed, JLS Wealth Management enables you to participate in the gains of the market while attempting to manage your downside risk.