Our Philosophy

In managing our clients' portfolios, we adhere to basic principles in a disciplined way. Our fundamentally conservative approach has led to above average, risk adjusted long term rates of return.

These basic principles are:

• Diversification - No matter how attractive the prospects are for a given company, a given industry, or a given country, it is difficult to know for sure to what extent the positive outlook is already reflected in current prices. Also, unforeseen negative surprises can and do occur. We believe in a broad degree of diversification and do not believe in placing big bets on a particular outcome.

• Value - It sounds perhaps obvious to say that buying securities when they are cheap will produce better long-term results than buying securities when they are expensive. However, securities are cheap only when there are obvious concerns; whereas, securities are rarely cheap when there are no clouds in the sky. As a result, buying securities when they are undervalued and, conversely, not jumping on the bandwagon, takes no small amount of patience and discipline.

• Quality - The vast majority of our portfolios are comprised of larger capitalization, high quality securities. This is true in the equity component and also on the fixed-income side where we do not believe in lowering our quality standards in order to reach for some additional yield. We will, from time to time, take a smaller position in unique opportunities that present themselves that are more junior or speculative in nature where the risk/reward ratio appears especially attractive.

• Simplicity - We believe in structuring portfolios and buying securities that are understandable to us, and, equally importantly, understandable to our clients and where there is no potential for unforeseen and unexpected risks. Consequently, while leverage and sophisticated hedging techniques may have their place in the management of hedge funds and large institutional portfolios, we do not view most of these strategies as being appropriate for our clients.