Mr. Motley: We're a smaller wealth management firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio. We manage a little over $560 million primarily for high net worth individuals. We are 23 people, 10 of which are professionals, five each financial planners and portfolio managers. I am a CFA, as are all the firm's portfolio managers. Our investment approach is very quantitative, driven by a proprietary quant model that's neither value nor growth. You could say it's GARP but we don't generally describe it that way. We focus on valuation, growth, quality, and dividend yield. We seek to maximize the combination of those four attributes for each company relative to its peers in its sector, and we structure portfolios on a sector neutral basis.
TWST: What are the products that you offer to your clients and what strategies do you have?
Mr. Motley: We don't offer different investment strategies like many firms do with different offerings such as small cap, value, et cetera. We don't slice and dice the market that way. Our offerings are: stand-alone, fee-only financial planning; investment management; and combination of the two, which is our wealth management offering. Within the investment management service, we primarily manage portfolios using individual stocks and bonds, but we also offer smaller accounts portfolios using mutual funds only. But the bulk of what we do is using individual securities. We don't have different flavors of portfolios, if you will. For different circumstances and risk tolerances, we vary the target asset allocation. One client might be 75% or 80% equity and another might be 30% equity. But within the equity portion of each portfolio, we are targeting the same list of the best stocks we can find in each industry at each point in time. But it's still a function of individual client circumstances. A particular client may have taxable holdings with low basis or other constraints. They may have social criteria or they may own a concentration of a stock held elsewhere. All those things are factored in and customized. But within that context, we seek to move equity portfolios in the same direction.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ABT, AFL, DO, MCD, NOC
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