Mr. Loewenstine: RiverPoint Capital Management continues to experience strong growth and is rapidly approaching $1 billion in assets. 2008 and 2009 were some of our best years in terms of adding new clients. We attribute a lot of that growth to our disciplined investment approach and active management of our client's asset allocation. We were early in selling many financial stocks before the crisis and adding some higher quality blue chip stocks. More important, we were early in reducing our client's equity exposure in late 2007 and early 2008 after several strong years of growth. At RiverPoint, our equity results continue to be excellent with our large-cap value and large-cap growth strategies ranking in the top 10% nationally year-to-date and since inception in the PSN database.
What sets RiverPoint apart from our competitors is our passion for investing. The portfolio managers at RiverPoint truly love investing. We spend a lot of time reading various publications as well individual company quarterly filings with the SEC. We do our own homework and form our own opinions. We are generally skeptical of most Wall Street research. We believe the key to successful investing is thinking and acting differently from the crowd and then most important having the conviction to stay with your discipline. It's also important in this time of uncertainty to realize that RiverPoint never takes possession of clients' assets. We always work with outside custodians in terms of holding client assets. They are either held at a bank or one of the discount brokerage firms like Charles Schwab. If most clients would adhere to a simple rule - "never give your money to anyone" scandals like Bernie Madoff and other similar scandals would never have occurred. That's something we think is really important to our clients, knowing they have an independent custodian holding their assets. I wish CNBC would just say once a day "never let your advisor take possession of your assets".
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