Mr. Shelton: Kanaly has been around for 34 years. It was founded here in Houston, Texas; it's one of the nation's first independent financial advisers focused on financial planning. Today we are a wealth management firm that manages approximately 2 billion in client assets; our clients are high-net-worth individuals. We provide wealth management services, including investment management, financial planning and state planning-type services.
Our investment philosophy is simply that we are trying to design portfolios for individuals that reduce volatility of their returns while enhancing the expected return on those portfolios. What we are really trying to do is maximize the benefits of investment compounding. What that means is that we are trying to protect our clients' portfolios from the downside so that we can compound more steady, consistent positive returns over time, which we think is the key to building wealth over the long term. That's our overall investment philosophy. As a wealth management firm, we are not selecting individual securities, rather we are managing a very broad, diversified asset allocation. And we are attempting to hire the best managers in each of those asset classes and trying to find managers that share a similar investment philosophy that we have, which is protect our clients' money on the downside and produce attractive absolute returns over the long term.
TWST: You are the Chief Investment Officer and responsible for overseeing the investment process. Tell us a little more about yourself and what you bring to Kanaly Trust with your experience.
Mr. Shelton: First of all, I have just over 20 years in the industry. I started my career at a bank, worked in a bank trust department managing portfolios for about 10 years in the 1990s. I also ran a registered investment advisory firm for three years here at Houston, Texas. I spent nearly six years with Invesco AIM here in Houston. I think from the standpoint of that background, bringing to Kanaly an understanding of the wealth management business. But also when I was at Invesco AIM, I was responsible for working with the institutional due diligence staffs at several firms around the country, like a Merrill Lynch, UBS and others in terms of working to get some of our portfolios on their investment platforms that were made available to all the financial advisers at those firms. As a result, I have a fair amount of experience in that overall due diligence process. When we set out to put together a wealth management platform here at Kanaly, I think that background has served me well in trying to put together a platform of some of the best managers out there in the business.
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