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Portfolios are built using individual stocks or mutual funds. Our minimum is $250,000. We will aggregate related accounts to reach the minimum, and have discretion to make exceptions.

Our ABEL Strategy is a managed stock portfolio with up to 20 positions. It is meant to provide a core foundation to other investments you may be making, with us, with other firms or on your own.  After a full market cycle (peak to valley to peak) our objective is to have provided a better return than the market on a risk adjusted basis. Our target return is 10%-12%. We expect to experience less volatility than what the market provides.

• Our master list from which investments are made consists of 620 quality companies with strong fundamentals and leadership in their sectors and industries. They have a track record of profitability, high stability and purity of earnings. Most pay dividends. The list contains large-, mid- and small-cap domestic companies, many with significant global exposure, with a mix of both value and growth opportunities.
  
  
• Purchases are made only when a company’s stock becomes attractively priced compared with its peers, industry, and sector. It is not unusual for the company to be out of favor when we make a purchase. If it is a ‘turn-around’ situation, we will give the company up to 24 months to start improving. The company must exhibit a good risk/reward ratio [more upside than downside]. If a stock passes fundamental and valuation tests, the last hurdle before the purchase is that a positive psychological comfort level must exist. We diversify by industry and sector.
  
  
• We take profits when the stock becomes fairly valued or slightly overvalued, and when the risk/reward ratio no longer is attractive. If we are fully invested and a more attractive opportunity comes to our attention, we may sell a position before it reaches its target.
  
  
• A stock’s price movement after we buy it does not concern us as long as the portfolio is behaving. Because we buy quality stocks at attractive prices, our stocks often behave positively when the general market weakens. This “flight to quality” results in reduced volatility of our portfolios.
  
  
• In addition to common stocks, we use Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) to create international, specific asset class, or sector exposure in client portfolios. Buys are made based on relative weakness, attractive valuation, and psychological comfort.
  
  
• Our “Sell Discipline” dictates that if a portfolio starts to decline and approaches being down 5% from its recent level, we will have started to raise cash. If the portfolio reaches ‘down 8%’ we would have gone to 100% cash. Although certain catastrophes could happen which would not allow us to implement this discipline before an 8% drop in value was realized, we expect them to be rare.

Growth mutual fund portfolios may have a single mutual fund as the core position and, depending on the size of the account, additional funds based on asset class and/or specific industries.
Income portfolios are built with stocks of fundamentally strong companies that pay dividends, and often include Exchange Traded Funds, and bonds. Traditional mutual funds may be used when circumstances merit.

Re-balancing of a portfolio is done when leadership starts to shift, or after an asset class, mutual fund, or stock, has experienced an unusual change in value.

We track the performance of asset classes to help identify new trends, changes in leadership, and turnaround situations.
Fund managers are evaluated monthly. Under-performance relative to their peer group and or asset class for 2-3 months in a row often results in replacing a fund.