IFA provides wealth services through the following six key roles:
The Professional
Offering expertise in assessing the state of your finances and developing risk-appropriate investment strategies to help you meet your goals.
The Listener
Emotional reactions to financial upheavals are real. Consequently, IFA listens to your fears and seeks out the issues driving those feelings to provide practical long-term answers.
The Teacher
The first step to avoiding emotion-driven investing is a simple matter of attaining higher investment knowledge. With IFA's extensive investor education program, we are uniquely positioned to be your teacher.
The Architect
Once these lessons are understood, IFA becomes an architect, helping you build a long-term wealth management strategy that best suits your specific risk capacity and lifetime goals.
The Coach
Even with a sound strategy in place, doubts and fears inevitably arise. When this happens, IFA reinforces academic investment principles to keep you on track.
The Guardian
As a long-term fiduciary, IFA is like a lighthouse keeper, scanning the horizon for issues that may affect you and keeping you informed of these developments.
IFA matches people with portfolios by carefully qualifying and quantifying five dimensions of an investor's risk capacity and matching it to five dimensions of a portfolio's risk exposure.
IFA obtains academically identified capital market rates of returns for its clients from approximately 13,000 public companies in the U.S. and approximately 43 other countries globally. IFA then designs highly tax-managed and low cost trading strategies, maintaining proper risk exposures through rebalancing. IFA offers a glide path option, offers tax loss harvesting, manages cash inflows and outflows, and provides monthly and inception to date detailed measurements of client performance relative to the IFA Indexes and other traditional benchmarks.
IFA positions clients to more successfully capture the returns of the funds. As shown below, the average fund investor and the do-it-yourself indexer have not been very successful at capturing the returns the market has to offer. The chart summarizes several studies on the percentage of returns captured by various types of investors.
IFA analyzed the performance of 652 clients who had been with IFA for at least seven years from 1/1/2008 to 12/31/2014. This period included the decline of equities during the global financial crisis of 2008 and early 2009, as well as the subsequent recovery period. For each of the 100 benchmark IFA Index Portfolios, IFA maintains monthly historical returns that can be used to benchmark our clients' time-weighted returns. For each client portfolio, we determined the annualized return of their portfolio and compare it to the annualized return of the originally recommended IFA Index Portfolio. Even though many of these clients had inception dates prior to 1/1/2008, we chose this time period so that each client would have experienced the same market conditions. The clients were divided into three groups based on how closely they followed IFA's advice:
Group #1 - This group consisted of 276 client portfolios that did not decrease their stock index allocation by more than 9% or increase it by more than 9% compared to IFA's original recommendation. We consider this group to be clients that followed IFA's advice. These clients captured 32.2% more of the available benchmark index portfolio return than clients in Group #3 who did not follow IFA's advice and substantially changed their risk level during the period.
Group #2 - This group consisted of 200 client portfolios that decreased their stock index allocation by 10% to 25% compared to IFA's original recommendation. We consider this group to be clients that mostly failed to rebalance their portfolios and instead elected to recalibrate, or reduce the risk level of their original portfolios in response to the global financial crisis. These clients still captured 17.1% more of the available benchmark portfolio return than clients who substantially changed their risk level in Group #3.
Group #3 – This group consisted of 176 client portfolios that either decreased their stock index allocation by more than 25% or increased it by at least 10% compared to IFA's original recommended portfolio. We consider this group to be clients that did not follow IFA's advice.
The results of the study are illustrated in this chart:
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