Beck Investment Management LLC

Choosing the best investment securities has several criteria:

We believe  minimizing  the  costs  to invest is critical in  portfolio construction. Costs include transaction costs,  expense  ratios  of  outside  managers,  and taxes.  Exchange Traded Funds  (ETFs) are one of the latest and best investment vehicles to keep costs low.

We construct  portfolios to  minimize the  impact of taxes.  We consider the differences between types of accounts  that a client  may hold:  taxable,  tax-deferred  retirement vehicle,  tax  advantaged  charitable trusts,  grantor trusts,  generation  skipping trusts  and  foundations.  Each of these  accounts  may  have differing  tax  considerations.  The  location  of  assets  within the different  accounts, therefore,  makes a significant difference in long-term wealth accumulation. 

We simply choose the best alternative for each asset class. Many of the stock asset classes are represented by indexes for several reasons:  low costs and tax-efficiency. Individual bonds are usually used in most accounts to provide income, safety and peace of mind.

We focus on risk management.  Two primary measures that we review are volatility, as measured by standard deviation, and downside risk.  We measure these for individual asset classes and for the overall diversified portfolio.  Decisions to add new asset classes are based on how they impact the overall portfolio’s expected return, volatility and downside risk.