Our Approach

Our process starts with gaining a deep understanding of your financial perspectives and values. We make it our goal to anticipate your needs and take steps to make investment decisions that hold true to your best interests.

Once we have insight into your distinct financial situation, we develop a customized, integrated wealth management solution. We incorporate strategies designed to manage volatility and reduce the time spent trying to recover from market downturns. At Four Financial Management, we believe that working to guard against market declines is crucial to successful investing.

Our investment method focuses on keeping your returns as “real” as possible. In pursuit of this goal, our team works hard to capture the market upside and guard against the downside. Losing less when the market goes down means you have less to make up to get to a place where your returns are real, not just “relative”. We believe our approach resonates with individuals who desire to grow assets over the long-term while employing a defensive strategy in tough times.

Risk management is critical to our investment philosophy. With our strategies, we actively monitor how the beta, standard deviation, and maximum drawdown compare to that of the Russell 3000 Index and Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index. In an effort to guard against large declines, our experienced team tactically adjusts the downside capture of our clients’ portfolios. Focused on capital appreciation, most of the gains we capture during a market rebound are designed to add to your long-term wealth, rather than just recover losses. Obviously, no investment strategy can allocate perfectly every time but because we follow our process with discipline, we believe our clients will benefit from this approach over time.

There is no guarantee that a diversified portfolio will enhance overall returns or outperform a non-diversified portfolio. Diversification and asset allocation do not protect against market risk. There is no assurance that these techniques are suitable for all investors or will yield positive outcomes.

The purchase of certain securities, which involve cost and risk, may be required to effect some of the strategies. The Russell 3000 Index is an unmanaged index which measures the performance of the largest 3000 U.S. companies representing approximately 98% of the investable U.S. equity market. The Barclay U.S. Aggregate Bond Index is an unmanaged market capitalization-weighted index of most intermediate term U.S. traded investment grade, fixed rate, non-convertible and taxable bond market securities including government agency, corporate, mortgage-backed and some foreign bonds. Indices cannot be invested into directly.

Beta measures a portfolio’s volatility relative to its benchmark. A Beta greater than 1 suggests the portfolio has historically been more volatile than its benchmark. A Beta less than 1 suggests the portfolio has historically been less volatile than its benchmark.

Standard Deviation is a historical measure of the variability of returns. If a portfolio has a high standard deviation, its returns have been volatile. A low standard deviation indicates returns have been less volatile.

Maximum Drawdown is an indicator of the risk of a portfolio chosen based on a certain strategy. It measures the largest single drop from peak to bottom in the value of a portfolio (before a new peak is achieved).