Money Management

We are passionate in the management of money to enhance your life experiences. We are an active money manager, meaning that we select and deselect securities for you according to criteria that includes:

• Suitability
• Valuation
• Likely propensity to continue paying dividends or interest
• Potential for growth in the next few months or the next few years
• Attractiveness of the macroeconomic outlook
• Management ability and integrity
• Shareholder stewardship

We cannot place enough importance on the integrity of company management and the stewardship that management and the Board of Directors exercises on behalf of shareholder-owner/creditors in the performance of business activity. A company may have beautiful-looking financial results (think Enron and Worldcom) but if those results are "cooked" in any way or if management is acting against the interests of us as shareholder-owners, we'd likely not invest in those companies as your fiduciary representatives.

Our money management style can be described as value opportunistic. We want to capture the best chance for you to achieve long-term income investment success with a minimum of risk. Value investing, the practice of seeking out securities which are worth more than what the market is "charging," offers the best long-term track record of the major investment styles and presents the best risk/reward profile. Truly, value investing involves buying low and selling high, but before the price gets so high that it presents and inordinate risk of falling.

We are opportunistic in that we actively seek market dislocations arising from psychological angst, such as uncertainty. We have found that buying at the maximum point of uncertainty (when others are being held back from buying by fear or confusion) offers the opportunistic investor excellent reward for what most likely is low risk. Examples of great uncertainty include the time just before the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq in 1990 and again in 2003 and the market in March 2009, when it was widely feared that the U.S. banking system would collapse despite the government aid.

Further details of our management style can be found in our income client handbook, When Logic And Emotion Collide. The treatment of the subject in the book is more thorough than we could present in a web site introduction.

Annual and cumulative investment results of our investment strategies are available on request. Just contact us for the most recent results.