Investing Principles

At Curtis Capital Advisors, we begin with the core belief that it is impossible to consistently correctly time the market or consistently select which specific investments will outperform the market in general or its category peers/benchmark.

Given this, we do not attempt to time the market nor do we lead our clients to believe that we will select investments that will outperform any specific benchmark or category peer. We believe that it is outside the realm of our ability, any other advisor’s ability, or any supercomputer for that matter, to consistently do such. In other words, there is no such thing as a crystal ball when it comes to predicting the stock market.

Our Three Principles

Therefore, we place all of our focus and energy on the 3 investing principles that ARE within our and our clients’ control.

Stock/Bond Mix

Our investment strategy primarily involves the research and selection of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and mutual funds for our clients’ portfolios. Our goal with each client is to construct an investment portfolio that seeks the maximum gain over time balanced carefully against each client’s unique risk tolerance and financial goals. Our belief and conviction is that investing in publicly traded equities should produce the highest returns over time but we also realize that very few clients have the risk tolerance to maintain their entire investment portfolio in equities given the inevitable, periodic declines in the stock market. As such, we work to strike the right balance for each client in terms of their overall allocation between equities and other, more conservative investments such as fixed income investment and cash (money market) balances.

Investing Expense

We believe in a bias towards using index funds for the majority of our clients’ portfolios. This allows us to minimize the total investing expense in relation to using a majority of actively managed funds that generally come with higher internal expenses. Data has shown that, over time, lower-cost index funds tend to outperform a majority of their higher-cost actively managed peer funds. In certain cases, we may still use actively managed funds in sectors where indexing has not historically provided outperformance. When it comes to our advisory fees, it is our belief that the ongoing advice and guidance are worth much more than what we charge. That being said, we have intentionally set our advisory fees near the 50th percentile of most advisors.

Investor Behavior

We believe that the preponderance of the value that our firm provides its clients comes in the form of managing the behavior once the investment portfolio is implemented. Historically, data has shown that the majority of individual investors without proper guidance underperform the market benchmarks. We believe that this isn’t due to poor security selection rather it is most often a result of attempts to time the market – both on the buy side and the sell side. Said another way, even average-performing investments held over long periods of time have historically been shown to produce superior returns than top-performing investments that are traded in and out of the market.

We’re here every step of the way

It is our intention to implement an investment strategy for each client to maximize the potential for long-term return balance against their own unique tolerance for risk and volatility, implement the strategy in a cost-conscious manner, and then – by far most importantly – do our best to keep our clients in that strategy for as long as possible. Changes to the investment strategy should only come from careful discussions with the client when their life situation and/or goals change as opposed to knee-jerk reactions to swings in the market. We aim to help our clients resist the inevitable temptations to chase outperforming investments or sectors and/or panic out of investments or sectors during the inevitable downturns. We believe that this is our best chance to add the most value in relation to the cost to work with us – far exceeding the work of security selection itself.

Given this, it is imperative that each client make us aware as soon as possible if their financial situation, their investing goals, or tolerance for risk and volatility changes.

In conclusion, we ask, ahem…require, that any prospective client of Curtis Capital Advisors read this and decide for themselves if they agree with our strongly held convictions. If not, we would be doing that client AND ourselves a huge disservice by accepting that engagement. We clearly realize that this will significantly shrink the pool of prospective clients eligible to work with our firm but it is our intention to focus our time and efforts on that select group of clients where we stand the best chance to benefit.

If after reading this, you understand and agree with our 3 investing principles, we would love the opportunity to meet and confirm if we would be mutually a good fit.

Menu