Moving Away From Self-Directed Investing
Case Study
Mr. Shepherd is a successful businessman with interests in manufacturing, real estate and service businesses. Over the past 25 years, he amassed a significant amount of liquid wealth spread across a wide variety of investment managers and brokerage firms. Investments were made on the recommendation of friends, brokers, and other financial professionals. As his accounts grew in size, he recognized that he needed someone to conduct more thorough due diligence on his current and prospective investment managers, advise him on the proper balance for the portfolio and organize investment information into a consolidated statement. His accountant introduced him to Massey Quick.
Key Issues
- Mr. Shepherd had long-standing relationships with many investment managers and brokerage firms. No evaluation framework was in place.
- There were over ten sub-accounts in place including personal accounts, trusts, family limited partnerships, retirement accounts, and corporate funds. While there was a broad objective for each pool of capital, there was no stated objective for each distinct entity.
- Some relationships had been in place for five years or longer. There was little ongoing dialogue with the investment managers.
- Custody was not centralized. It was difficult to keep track of statements, confirmations, and cash movements. No checks or balances were in place.
Our Approach
Massey Quick was retained as an investment consultant for the Shepherd family and receives a fixed quarterly fee for our services, which include: initial and ongoing manager due diligence; advice on asset allocation and best practices; manager search and selection; performance reporting; and portfolio accounting.
The first step in the process was to set up due diligence meetings with each of the underlying managers. Our primary goal was to understand how many units of risk our client was taking for each unit of return being delivered back to them. Our quantitative analysis focused on three core risks: drawdown risk, correlation risk, and volatility risk. Our quantitative due diligence involved face-to-face meetings with each of the equity and alternative managers that enabled us to: meet key personnel; gain an understanding of the investment process and ascertain the repeatability of that process; and evaluate operational risk and other key issues.
The fixed income portion of the portfolio had been self-directed through several brokerage relationships, so we examined asset allocation across the broad spectrum of sub accounts. We examined asset location in order to evaluate if the most tax-efficient managers and strategies were in the taxable entities and the most tax inefficient investments were in tax-exempt entities (IRAs, pension funds, etc.).
Our Recommendations
- Massey Quick suggested the elimination of hedge fund of funds from the portfolio, replacing the alternative allocation with a customized portfolio of hedge fund managers across a variety of styles. This removed leveraged managers from the mix and saved our client over $100,000 in fees per annum.
- While keeping some of the incumbent equity funds, we reduced concentration substantially by spreading out the portfolio to a wider variety of managers, focusing on market capitalization, growth versus value and domestic versus international allocations. We renegotiated fees with existing managers. We eliminated managers with high correlations to their benchmark – paying fees to a closed index fund makes no sense.
- We aggregated the fixed income portfolios and sent them to one of our core managers for evaluation, focusing on credit quality and interest rate risk. We urged our client to have these portfolios professionally and actively managed. We helped to select two firms to take responsibility for this process.
- We suggested ways to rebalance the portfolios for tax efficiency. Managers were “relocated” to minimize the potential tax impact on our client.
- We publish a monthly consolidated statement for our client, capturing performance data from each custodian. Massey Quick aggregates performance for the portfolio as a whole and also breaks it down to each sub-account.
- We provide full portfolio accounting services to Mr. Shepherd, tracking each transaction, interest payments, dividends, cash movement, and realized and unrealized capital gains and losses.
- We meet quarterly to discuss asset allocation, rebalancing, the performance of each manager and the ongoing due diligence findings of the Massey Quick research team.
Essentially, Massey Quick serves as an outsourced investment staff for the Shepherd family office.
