Know What You Own and Why You Own It

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Our core philosophy can be summed up with the phrase ‘know what you own and why you own it’. If your financial advisor cannot adequately explain to you why you own something or what your underlying investments are, then you probably should not own it. If you cannot easily understand all of the fees and are able to make a true assessment of your total cost of ownership, then you should probably skeptical of such an investment. If you feel you are part of the investment ‘herd’ or paying to much for a ‘cookie cutter’ asset allocation strategy then you probably are. If you feel that you have to much turnover or trading in your account, then you probably do. If your statement is full of pages and pages of transactions and you are uncomfortable because you are not sure what is going on in the account, then you should probably make some changes. If your advisor doesn’t do his or her own homework and is peddling his or her firm’s latest ‘best idea’ then you should probably think twice. If your advisor does not develop his own independent ideas or has not brought you a truly unique investment idea, then you are probably a member of the Wall Street crowd. We call our philosophy the new old school because it is about getting back to the basics of investing, avoiding complexity, minimizing extraneous fees and investing for the long term.