If you’ve accumulated a significant portfolio, you likely have made some good decisions and may have run into good fortune along the way. At Palisades Hudson, our clients find peace of mind in knowing our expertise and discipline will help them to further grow and protect their wealth in both good times and challenging ones.
Nothing about the future is guaranteed, in life or in investing, and much is out of our control. That is why it is important to focus on what you can control and create a financial plan designed to work in a variety of circumstances. Systematically developing an investment plan based on your personal financial goals and risk tolerance can improve your financial outcomes. This becomes even more critical as your wealth increases. As portfolios grow more complex, the costs of missteps or missed opportunities also increase.
That’s where we come in. At Palisades Hudson, we focus on building deep and long-term relationships with our clients, often assisting with many aspects of their financial affairs beyond investment management. Because we are financial planners as well as investment managers, we add value by managing clients’ portfolios holistically as part of a comprehensive financial picture that includes tax, retirement planning, insurance and estate planning. While many of our clients are fully capable of handling their own financial affairs, they choose to partner with us to help improve their financial decisions. Other clients recognize that finances are not their specialty, and they take a mostly hands off approach. Regardless of their preference for active involvement, we ensure that all of our clients understand how we’re managing their wealth.
Once we work with a client to develop his or her long-term investment approach, including a target asset allocation (a mixture of stocks, bonds, cash, etc.), we help the client stick to that plan. In practice, this means we never truly stop planning for a particular client. We remain focused on ongoing, comprehensive planning that adapts as a client’s life evolves, and that responds to changes in the tax, regulatory and geopolitical landscapes.
The Palisades Hudson investment approach combines tested academic principles and our own advisers’ practical knowledge, drawn from years of managing client portfolios through a variety of market conditions. Most of our clients’ portfolios consist of diversified investment vehicles such as mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, but we have the flexibility to use other approaches when appropriate. We work to minimize expenses and taxes wherever possible, since we know they can represent a significant drag on long-term investment returns. Because of our independence, clients can be assured that we have access to a broad array of investment options and that we make all our decisions solely in our clients’ best interest. We receive compensation only from our clients.
While the idea of jumping into and out of the market based on short-term predictions is alluring, very few secure good outcomes this way. My colleagues and I help clients to avoid playing a game that they cannot win by structuring a portfolio to weather the good times and the bad.
Our approach focuses on a long-term, disciplined, diversified asset allocation strategy. Such a strategy anticipates the ups and downs of the stock market over time; provides the benefits of routinely rebalancing to a target asset allocation; and is tailored to reduce the volatility of clients’ overall portfolios based on their personal risk tolerances and cash flow needs. Experiencing a portfolio decline can be difficult, but it is inevitable from time to time if you want to pursue the potential higher returns of stocks. We have seen that remaining disciplined and sticking to a well-constructed plan consistently yields long-term success.
Palisades Hudson’s staff has invested through many market environments: the dot-com bubble; the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Great Recession; and the COVID-19 pandemic, and the subsequent return of high inflation and higher interest rates. We will continue to navigate our clients through the surprises of the coming decades by relying on our longstanding principles: maintaining diversification, staying disciplined, protecting capital and focusing on the long term.
If you think we can help you, please feel free to contact me or one of our client service managers. We look forward to assisting in any way that we can.
