Generate Good Ideas

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In the increasingly commoditized market of financial services it has become more important for investment advisors to differentiate themselves. One method has been to offer a new financial product that either has more bells or whistles such as an insurance product. The strategy of the mutual fund complex is to offer the next ‘must have’ investment product that will help you ‘check off’ another box in your asset allocation or peddling the fund-of-funds retirement product with a name of the year you would like to retire. Another recent fad has been to offer exclusive access to the hottest ‘hedge fund’ manager last year. While each of these investment strategies may be appropriate for some investors, we believe the simplest approach that can achieve a client’s goals with less fees and is easy to understand is probably the best. For instance, a client may want income in retirement. An old-fashioned laddered bond portfolio combined with a simple term life insurance policy may achieve the same objective as a fancy insurance product at a fraction of the cost. In fact, you might not even need the insurance. We like the idea of a laddered bond portfolio because we can control what we own in terms of the credit quality, yield and maturity of the portfolio. It is transparent, there is minimal complexity, we control the turnover of these bonds and it has modularity meaning we can sell any of the bonds, at any time, for whatever reason. We keep it simple. It seems like a good idea to us.