Is It Time to Get More Defensive?

We often hear from clients who want to know how their hard-earned investment gains will withstand market corrections. Chief Investment Officer Jim Lowell discussed this topic in our recent quarterly webinar*: Investing Through Impeachments and Trade Wars.

Please enjoy the excerpt above and click here for the full webinar replay to hear more.

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Jim Lowell: Because the concern of getting more defensive, now or later, when we do when we don’t… it’s something that is a constant source of debate among the investment research team. And right now, I don’t think we’re seeing anything that would suggest that we need to become more defensive today or tomorrow in our overall portfolio positioning. But if you look at your portfolio and others look at their portfolio they’ll see that we already have defensive positions in place.

Jim Lowell: And of course, a lot of what we do in terms of asset allocation, determinations, depending upon your risk toleranceThe amount of loss an investor is willing to absorb in their investment portfolio., your goals, your income needs, is to align the asset allocation with that tripartite concern of every individual client here at Adviser Investments. But another thing that we do is we’re constantly screening the managers that we invest in alongside of you, not just for their return capabilities, but for their riskThe probability that an investment will decline in value in the short term, along with the magnitude of that decline. Stocks are often considered riskier than bonds because they have a higher probability of losing money, and they tend to lose more than bonds when they do decline. management skill set.

Jim Lowell: There’s not a manager that we invest our money in, your money in, whose bear marketA period in which stock prices decline significantly from recent highs and remain below previous high marks for weeks or months. Generally, a decline of at least 20% in stock prices is considered the threshold marking the start of a bear market. track record, whose recession track record, whose down market days versus up market days in the calendar year track record we don’t know backward and forward and haven’t spoken with directly about those issues. So we at Adviser Investments for 25 years have always said that we focus first on managing risk, and second on delivering return. If you get the first part of that equation right for long-term investors, you’re almost always going to be better off.

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Click here for a replay of Investing Through Impeachments and Trade Wars. Please contact us at (800) 492-6868 to learn more about comprehensive wealth management solutions.