" We believe our thoughtful, Six Step Approach is the best approach to help our clients achieve their goals"

Portfolio Management - Detail

The Six Step Approach

Built around our client’s unique needs, our Six Step Approach seeks to combine the client’s financial goals and risk tolerance with an effective, diversified and sophisticated investment strategy.


Step 1. Clarification of Goals, Risk, Values and Concerns.
Identifying needed income and investment goals, time horizons, and tolerance for risk are the essential starting points in building a good portfolio. Also important is understanding clients’ social and environmental attitudes and whether they wish them included in the process. Going beyond the simple “suitability” questionnaires, our experience shows that gaining a deeper understanding of a client’s needs, concerns, and goals initially could establish a more appropriate strategy and prevent bigger problems down the road.

Step 2. Building a Proper Asset Allocation
Our method is a diversified investment approach based on sound, long-standing investment principles. This mean diversifying investments across various asset classes in a manner that seeks to meet both the financial goals and risk tolerance of our clients.

Our strategy means finding the optimum allocation of asset classes, and adjusting that allocation to accommodate changing market conditions and a client’s needs and goals.

Step 3. Choosing the Right Investments
We then select a combination of investment types. For our equity portfolios, we do this by using an approach that combines core index vehicles, a careful selection of money managers via mutual funds, exchange traded funds and closed end funds, and adding other selected individual securities. For income portfolios, we select from a variety of dividend and interest vehicles to provide a balanced, predictable supply of income over time. This is where we’ll also incorporate social or environmental concerns in the portfolio.

Step 4. Finding Opportunities
Almost every market condition presents opportunities for investments in our global economic world. Keeping our clients’ risk concerns in mind, we seek to identify investment opportunities from a broad range of different assets to help improve portfolio performance or help reduce portfolio risk.

Step 5. Adjusting to Market Conditions
Yes, we take a long term approach, but that doesn’t mean standing idly by during changing and turbulent market conditions. What we’ve seen repeatedly, and certainly overly the last year, is that trimming down risk during turbulent times is an important tool to helping clients achieve their goals and improve peace of mind.

Step 6. Reviewing, Refining, Retuning
One thing every investor knows, is that things change, and client needs and goals often change over time. Some portfolio investments don’t perform as well as intended and need to be replaced. Sometimes market conditions alter fundamentally. Or portfolios need to be rebalanced. Circling back to our clients is important to monitor their needs, just as reviewing and retuning portfolios over time is important to helping achieve goals.


 

Key Concepts Underlying Our Investment Approach


Fundamental Asset Allocation

Over the long term, there is probably no aspect more important to portfolio performance and volatility than proper asset diversification. At Good Harvest, we utilize a sophisticated asset allocation model that incorporates a broad number of asset classes optimized to an investors’ need for risk and returns. Portfolios are recalibrated periodically to insure that they conform with these models.

Asset Selection

Good Harvest draws from an almost unlimited universe of assets to optimally meet its asset allocation. A sizeable percentage of the assets will be index-based assets – usually through exchange-traded funds -- that properly model the particular asset class. The remainder of the assets will be comprised of a combination of individual securities and carefully selected active money managers, including mutual funds, that have historically outperformed and add what’s called “alpha” to a portfolio. For our clients concerned about social and environmental concerns, or those that wish to target green investments, it is at this stage that we will select the appropriate specific investments.

Tactical Allocation

Recent times have shown how dramatically market conditions change. Our clients, while long-term investors, appreciate our ability to adjust portfolios to changes in market conditions, and help limit risk during periods of turbulence. Good Harvest utilizes a variety of approaches in addressing changing market conditions to help reduce risk and even take advantage of challenging conditions, including reducing exposure in the more volatile asset classes and using hedging strategies.

Identifying Opportunities

In almost every market environment, there are opportunities that become available. Good Harvest allocates a portion of our client portfolios to investment opportunities that we feel are in keeping with the clients’ risk profile. These could include individual equity positions, or ETF’s focused on a particular sector or currency or region, and could be of a short-term, mid-term, or long-term nature. We do not employ "day-trading".

Re-tuning and Adjusting

Good Harvest engages in a regular in-house assessment of the economy and markets and makes appropriate portfolio adjustments. In addition, our regular communications with our clients helps insure that our management is in keeping with the goals and circumstances of our clients.

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