Highly-disciplined
METHODOLOGY
INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT
For decades, our founding fiduciary advisers have provided clients with professional investment management services tailored to meet their individual needs.
Whether their goal is to construct an equity, fixed income or balanced portfolio, Milestones principal advisers help clients define their wealth management objectives and then design a customized portfolio strategy to achieve them. We make every effort to be independent and objective in the advice that we provide and we will succeed or fail on the basis of the integrity and quality of that advice.
One of Milestones' primary objectives is to deliver excellent investment results by offering a combination of core proprietary investment capabilities and strategies which are highly disciplined. Taken together — and combined with our wealth management discipline—we believe our capabilities offer exactly the right combination of ingredients to help our clients successfully manage their financial affairs.
At Milestones, our goal is simple — to help you achieve your long-term financial goals. Our portfolio management techniques are designed to align with your individual needs. We take the time to understand your personal financial situation, long-term goals and investing objectives before making any recommendations. We utilize that information to craft a portfolio specifically for you — but it will not be static. Over time, your portfolio may change based on either your personal circumstances or our forward-looking and highly-disciplined analysis of the economy and financial markets.
We are active asset managers who believe in the importance of balancing tactical flexibility and tax efficiency. Managing active strategies allows us to efficiently adjust to changing circumstances and take advantage of opportunities as financial markets and economic conditions evolve.
From initial portfolio construction to ongoing management, our investment approach is deliberate, disciplined, methodical and dynamic. Our portfolios are built with strict buy/sell disciplines and incorporate diversification aimed at minimizing issue-specific and structural risks.
Rigorous top-down analysis, complemented by macroeconomic and technical insights, create the foundation for informed investment decisions. Through qualitative insight and proprietary quantitative research, our team seeks to uncover attractive investment opportunities aligned with the goals of each portfolio strategy.
Two common approaches to investment portfolio construction are bottom-up investing and top-down investing. A bottom-up investing approach is essentially a stock-picking method where you focus on individual security selection rather than a portfolio’s allocation to various countries, company-sizes, security types or other characteristics.
We prefer a top-down investing approach. This method emphasizes broader economic factors. The strategy determines the allocation and selection of assets based on macroeconomic characteristics and how they expect to affect different areas of the market. Once the investors have identified the areas they think will perform well, they can select individual securities within those areas.
Milestones follows a different approach to investing than the typical investment manager. Given our discipline focus and in-depth quantitative research, we build high conviction portfolios of select asset classes. The traditional approach, which focuses on riding a benchmark or including all asset classes, is to build portfolios which invest in every area of the market in hopes of diversifying market risk and minimizing the impact of any one holding.
Our approach, which continuously evaluates the economic overlay and the relative attributes of each asset class and their subcategories, identifies what we believe to be the most select asset classes with the best risk-return proposition at any given point in time. Our goal is to find the best areas to balance the mitigation of risk with the pursuit of profit, rather than owning the most asset classes in an attempt to diversify away from risk.
We proactively monitor portfolios and rebalance investments based on evolving client objectives, category-specific outlooks, and our view of investment markets and global economies. We regularly engage with private clients, while leveraging integrated portfolio management systems that help ensure adherence to client and strategy guidelines.
We believe liquidity creates an ability to realize value and efficiently adjust portfolios in dynamic markets. All our strategies emphasize high quality liquid securities, which can help enhance portfolio flexibility and mitigate risk.
We take a variety of factors into account to create a portfolio tailored to your needs. Some of the factors we may consider when choosing the optimal long-term investment strategy and near-term portfolio tactics include:
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Time horizon
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Investment goals
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Income needs
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Tax considerations
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Outside assets
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Outside income
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Restrictions or customizations
Milestones has developed experience-based, sustainably-competitive proprietary market research, investment strategies and methodologies... not product.
Our suite of proprietary growth portfolios are designed to seek above-average compound annual returns over complete market cycles and to attempt to do so with below-market levels of risk. We have two growth strategies available exclusively to our clients, which employ differing methodologies for achieving the goal of long-term growth of wealth.
Milestones' proprietary fixed income management encompasses investment grade municipal, high yield municipals and government/corporate bond portfolios.
We invite you to explore the breadth of our portfolio/investment strategies.
