Kent Thune, CFP®, MBA, founded Atlantic Capital Investments (ACI) on the idea that life is not about making money -- money is about making a life: Meaning comes before money, purpose precedes planning.
The virtues of simplicity, moderation, humility, patience, and altruism consistently yield financial (and life) success:
- Simplicity: Less is more. There is no need for expensive and complex investment types or strategies to produce investment returns sufficient to grow your assets to achieve your life goals. Each client investment portfolio, like every human being, is unique; however, there is rarely a need for more than 8 or 10 mutual funds and/or Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) to achieve client investment strategies.
- Moderation: It is prudent to seek achievable and acceptable absolute returns, by means of a diverse and moderate investment allocation, suitable to meet your investment objective. The attempt to outperform "the market" often, and paradoxically, increases the odds of failure to meet investment objectives. Similarly, abandoning investment strategies can significantly harm portfolio returns. For example, a $100,000 diversified portfolio of index mutual funds, held from the peak of the market in 2007 and sold to cash during the panic in September of 2008, would have a value of $86,140 at the end of 2010; whereas the investor who held on to their moderate mix of stock and bond index funds had an account value of $102,140.
- Humility: The prudent investor focuses primarily on those things that are within his or her control (asset allocation, asset location, investment selection, savings rate), while maintaining a proactive -- not reactive -- posture with regard to things beyond the investor's control (i.e. stock market cycles, economic cycles, geo-political conditions). In other words, humility requires one to be aware of their own ignorance; future events are not certain or knowable. Therefore prediction is never wise and market timing is rarely productive over long periods of time.
- Patience: Slow and steady wins the race! You need to arrive at your investment objective on time and unharmed; otherwise you risk undermining your life plans by increasing the possibility for unsustainable investment declines. Risk management trumps reward chasing; and a strong defensive strategy is paramount to a successful offensives strategy.
- Altruism: ACI is as client-centered as financial advice gets: As an independent, fee-only, registered investment adviser, ACI upholds a true fiduciary standard of care by placing client needs ahead of its own. In contrast, the traditional brokers, bankers and insurance agents are product/sales centered; they get paid commissions or share in the revenue generated by the products or services they sell, regardless of the results generated for the client. These conventional financial advisers, even with good intentions, are not able to fulfill a truly client-centered, altruistic investment philosophy. ACI is the investment adviser working for you, not the competing interests!
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