Why clients choose us
Institutional Investment Management Experience
The financial planning industry is arguably one of the most difficult industries for consumers to navigate. The existence of endless product offerings, self-proclaimed experts with differing views, and up-to-the-minute media coverage make it extremely difficult for the consumer to make the right purchase decision. Unfortunately, this often leads the consumer to invest in products or strategies they don’t understand. The Crescent Group holds it as our priority to protect our clients from ending up in this type of situation.
Our Group has institutional investment management experience, including mergers & acquisitions, capital markets, and institutional asset management experience at some of the world’s most renowned financial firms.
This allows us to have a tremendous amount of conviction when advising clients. In addition, our ability to clearly explain our investment process to our clients promotes greater client understanding and overall transparency.
Fiduciary responsibility
Within RBC Wealth Management’s Portfolio Focus program, our Group is held to a Fiduciary Standard, which requires that every investment we recommend is in our clients’ best interest.
Fee only and the elimination of conflicts of interest
Within RBC Wealth Management’s Portfolio Focus program, we are fee-only advisors. This means that when we make an investment change, it’s because it’s in our clients’ best interest, and not because it generates commissions. In fact, our Portfolio Focus clients pay us a flat percentage fee, regardless of how many investment changes or trades we make.
Experience and confidence to advise our clients with conviction
Statistics show that individual investors often let their emotions get the best of them. According to a 2014 release of Dalbar's Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior (QAIB), the average investor in a blend of equity and fixed-income mutual funds had garnered only a 1.9% net annualized rate of return for the 30-year time period ending Dec. 31, 2013. Part of the blame lies with the investor, but you certainly have to question the contribution by investment advisors as well. The right investment decision is often counterintuitive and runs against what feels right emotionally. Utilizing our institutional investment management experience, we focus on making the right decisions on behalf of our clients, and take the time to explain to them why they should or shouldn’t do something.
Our investment approach helps protect against overvalued markets
One of our Group’s primary focuses is to prevent our clients from investing in inflated markets. The losses stemming from the dot-com bubble and the financial crisis still loom large in many investors’ minds and investment accounts.
In our view, it’s impossible to value the stock market as a whole, and thus impossible to consistently protect yourself from buying when markets are overvalued. For example, the Dow Jones Index was flat from 1964 to 1981, and the S&P 500 Index was flat from 2000 to 2013.
While it’s not possible to place a valuation on the entire stock market, we can do so with individual companies, which helps us to succeed at investing at reasonable prices, and protect against overpaying.
We invest client assets according to the same principles we use to invest our personal assets
The majority of our Group’s personal assets are invested in the same investments our clients own. This aligns our interests with our clients’ interests in a unique way.
