Our Approach
A History of Innovation
Emerging Markets:
In the early 1990's, Scott Sadler (Boardwalk's founder) saw that the world 's economic balance and investment profile was rapidly changing. To seize this opportunity, he led the effort to launch of one of the Southeast's first emerging markets equity funds. This fund was one of the industry's top performers, an achievement Sadler believed was attributable to the teams's unique investment approach.
The team believed that the benchmark indexes at that time were inherently too concentrated in just a few markets and too risky. In Sadler's view, real risk was the losing money, not underperforming some benchmark. So his team created a benchmark-agnostic approach, favoring off-the-beaten-path countries that often zigged when other markets zagged. This added diversification to the portfolio and helped the fund avoid many "land mines" among the largest markets in the benchmark indexes. Losing less money in bad markets helped them achieve top tier performance over the fund's life.
Values-based Investing
More than 10 years later, Sadler again saw a "sea change" in investor behavior and potential -- this time, in values-based investing. Believing that most "social funds" were noble but mediocre performers, he had initially dismissed the ideas as "voodoo". But after months of research, he determined that a "best-of-class" sustainable investing approach was the best way to have competitive perform versus the broader indexes.
Dispensing with the extremes of earlier fund managers, he focused on building portfolios to have "competitive performance with a better footprint." This permitted great customization for each individual investor, and today, it is a competitive option for any investors who seek to tailor their investments to their personal values.
How Boardwalk Capital works with you
Everything flows from your Detailed Financial Plan. The steps below outline just a few of the actions we take to create this plan and to comprenehsively manage your wealth.
- PROFILE: Through discussions and a range of questionnaires, we initially seek to gain a deep understanding of your goals, objectives, and your tolerance for market volatility.
- ADVISE: Advising you on savings strategies and employing techniques to minimize taxes along the way. Helping you avoid so-called tax "torpedoes" that can raise Medicare premiums and taxes on Social Security payments.
- TRUST: Ensuring that your assets easily pass to your heirs, avoiding frozen bank accounts, probate, courts and lawyers. Helping you create revocable trust accounts, as needed.
- PLAN: Planning for Social Security claiming strategies, evaluating long-term care insurance, and considering if lifetime income vehicles are a fit for your needs. We advise you beyond just your investments.
- DISCOVER: Helping you to uncover and refine any social objectives you may have and creating unique strategies to meet them, including custom individual stock portfolios that continuously harvest losses throughout the year.
- TEST: "Stress testing" your plans under dire scenarios to make sure they can stand up to inevitable market challenges, unforeseen taxation, higher inflation or weaker markets. Revisiting and improving the plan to raise the probability of success.
- IMPLEMENT: Revising your plan until it fits your needs, ultimately putting your plan into action, executing trades, monitoring results, and revising again, as needed.
- MANAGE: Creating a strategic sequencing plan for distributions from your various accounts in retirement to minimize taxes, and planning ahead with Roth conversions.
"Grading" your plan. Does it get a 90% score? In this process, you will see just how robust your plan is -- thanks to 1000+ Monte Carlo simulations that show the percentage chance you plan has of achieving your goals. Not high enough for your comfort? We model techniques, strategies and asset types that could improve those chances.
It's not what you make, it's what you keep. An investor's true return is their after-tax, after inflation, net-of-fees return. So, we work to keep costs and taxes low, only recognizing capital gains when we believe a new idea can do better net of taxes. The avoidance of tax torpedoes will pay for our services for decades.
We care about asset location as well as asset allocation, using tax favored accounts (both traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs) for strategies that are more likely to generate short-term capital gains. For your taxable accouts, we build highly tax-efficient portfolios that will compound wealth over time while continuing to defer taxes.
Together, this is about what you keep. This is meeting your financial goals in a way that fits you.