The Trustee Portfolio

When it comes to handling money, you find two personalities. Trustees, and gamblers.

The job of a trustee is a lot like valet parking a Ferrari. It’s not your car. Taking it for a joyride is out of the question.

In a market sense, the trustee takes care to stay invested in trends, while balancing exposure and long term sustainability.

The gambler doesn’t do that. Gamblers need action, excitement, and the pain of losing. They soothe inevitable pain by blaming external factors for causing their mistake. Then they repeat it.

Most gamblers never figure this out. When it comes to caring for large sums of money, it’s a bad combination.

Separate Portfolios

Yesterday’s tools don’t always work tomorrow.

The responsible trustee changes with the times. For us, that means running two strategies. To make it simple, we call it “Core” and “Cyclical.”

When it comes to a core position, there’s an ownership mentality. After close to two decades of market leading companies that seemed to make nothing, real businesses are back in focus. Companies making things we need, in the same country as their customer base… most of us almost forgot what that felt like.

And typically, that’s not an in and out trade. You rarely see hot news stories, or double-leveraged betting ETFs focused on them. This is slow money. Today, that means more than it did in the hot money years.

But renting works too…in the right context. There are always cycles. These are trades moving with a shorter trend. Quarters, multiple quarters, or on events that are very real, but might not stick around for decades.

There’s a place for that…and keeping things separate helps the trustee balance the need to grow, responsibly. Managing risks unique to any individual.

Below you’ll see how we do it, updated with each issue.