Our Investment Philosophy

Whether it relates to investment planning, insurance planning, retirement planning, tax planning, or estate planning, it is our first principle that simpler plans are, more often than not, the more efficient.

Market Wiz Advisors does believe in market timing. We believe that investors make money by participating in the markets, not by trying to outguess them.

Our Firm subscribes to what is known as the "efficient market hypothesis" which leads to the conclusion, also confirmed by overwhelming evidence, that neither laymen investors nor professional money managers, no matter how smart they are, how much they are paid, or how hard they try, can make determinations, on any absolute scale, as to whether a security is under priced or over priced with a reliability greater than that of random chance. Our earnings depend on your success. We use a methodology that selects investments based upon a criterion personally overseen by our firm and its network of analysts.

We do believe, however, that useful judgments can be made concerning the fundamentals of an underlying company which can, in turn, lead to useful judgments about the company's outlook for future growth, and so the prospects for its common stock. Additionally, we believe that useful judgments can be made about the price level of a common stock or Regulation D stock relative to a client's tolerance for risk.

We sometimes think we can better communicate the kinds of investments we encourage by listing the investments we do not encourage. In particular, we do not encourage investments in mutual funds, managed accounts, initial public offerings, real estate investment trusts, foreign stocks, limited partnerships, options, commodities, deferred annuities, cash value life insurance, convertible bonds, long-term bonds, utility stocks, or any of the myriad of "special products" that financial institutions create for their clients.

In a more positive vein, for most investors, we advocate what we call a "barbell" approach to portfolio design. We suggest a balance between two classes of investments, depending upon the client's tolerance for volatility. One class of investments is simply cash - in the form of U. S. Treasury bills, bank CDs, or a money market account. The other class consists of a broadly diversified list of the common stocks of high-quality, growth companies. Somewhere on the spectrum between 50% cash, 30% common stocks and 20% in small cap stocks.

We also work with a universe of common stocks which we classify as "aggressive" growth companies, as opposed to "high-quality" growth companies, which we make available to our more venturesome clients.