Most investors either literally invest in high risk indexes or are effectively doing so in mutual funds that benchmark to indexes (like the funds in your 401K), which means investors nearly always suffer all the risk of these indexes. And when they do they lose investors substantial amounts of money in a short time.  And they can take literally a decade or more to recover.  Imagine your money becoming not so serious again!

Our investment philosophy is to make sure that you don’t lose money you can’t make back. Which means we are very careful about how we invest our client’s serious money.

When you are first starting out and accumulating wealth, you can endure the volatility that comes along with this for two reasons. You get the benefit of dollar cost averaging (which means you buy more when prices fall). And you have a long time to recover. It’s not serious yet.

Money becomes serious when is money that you don’t want to lose and not get back.

It’s money that you inherited. It’s money you accumulated over many years in a 401k (which now you might be able to manage differently if you changed jobs). Its money from sale of a business. It’s money that you will need for future income or that you intend on leaving as an inheritance or both.

It’s serious money now.

And when its serious money you need to manage it in a serious way. Which means you need to make sure the incentives of the people managing it are 100% in line with yours. Which means you want to make sure that anyone managing this money also manages his own money the same way. It means you need to be 100% certain that the people managing your money will put you before anyone else.

The problem is that few advisors really do this. Even if you advisor is the most moral person on the planet he probably works for a firm that LEGALLY must put his firm’s interests before your interests. Most investors work with advisors employed by publicly traded firms. These firms have a legal duty to put shareholders (people that own shares of the stock of the companies) before anyone else. It’s in their corporate charter.

At Global View, our clients are SERIOUS INVESTORS. Serious investors invest with investment managers who have skin in the game (which means their money is invested alongside yours). Serious investors first goal is to avoid money you can’t make back (which means they look at valuation, quality and growth). Serious investors take the right risk (which means they avoid taking unnecessary risks).

Serious investors also consider the financial planning ramifications of everything they do. Serious investors like to get rid of all their debt, including their mortgage. Because serious investors don’t like to worry about these things. And serious investors do the work. They find investment advisors who don’t have conflicts of interest. Which means they don’t do business with advisors who work for a publicly traded company, who have insurance licenses, or who can receive commissions.

If you are a client of Global View you already know how we handle serious money. Before we invest the first dollar we make sure we understand your attitude toward risk. Which means only then can we COACH you on the level of volatility you can expect in your portfolio and talk about worst case situations. And then, when we have agreement on this, we can decide how to allocate your risk to match expected volatility. We often use terms like “High Risk,” “Medium Risk,” and “Lower Risk” to describe the behavior of investments in your portfolio. Because we expect the volatility of these and the returns of these to be different.

Every manager (and our own internal stock strategies) was selected (or created) with the express purpose of not losing money that can’t be made back, for serious money.

And we have deep relationships with ever investment manager in our portfolio. Which means we have conversations with them, we visit them, and we too are invested in these strategies.

If you have serious money, imagine how this might be beneficial to you.