MDE's innovative asset management approach is founded in a philosophy that addresses risk and return in the context of both personal client circumstances and market outlook. We focus on building portfolios that can adapt efficiently to changing market conditions. We seek to maximize the liquidity, transparency, and tax efficiency of client portfolios, while preserving wealth and delivering the potential for attractive returns. Using proprietary techniques, we diversify investments across risk exposures and build portfolios designed for today’s “new market realities” of variable growth, continued volatility, and periodic crisis.
Highlights of our asset management process include:
Open-architecture investment platform of carefully selected managers and strategies
MDE objectively evaluates all investment opportunities to identify high-quality solutions for our clients’ portfolios. When necessary, we also have the expertise to develop unique proprietary solutions that balance our clients’ needs for growth and return with prudent management of exposure to risk.
Diversification and adaptive asset allocation
MDE builds efficiently diversified portfolios by assessing the return potential of multiple investment opportunities balanced against exposure to market, credit, duration, currency, global macro, liquidity, and other risks. As our market outlook changes, we adjust clients’ allocations to ensure portfolios remain aligned with their family’s goals.
Separate account management
MDE was an early innovator in the use of separately managed accounts for high net worth investors. These investment vehicles offer the flexibility and potential tax advantages of direct security ownership. In addition, MDE’s size allows us to benefit from the leverage of an institutional investor to negotiate favorable manager fee rates for our clients.
Alternative Investments
MDE is committed to a more client-centric model of alternative investing. When appropriate, we offer access to high quality hedge funds, funds of funds, and alternative mutual funds, with a special focus on transparency, liquidity, and low fees.
Active tax management and loss harvesting
MDE firmly believes that it is not what our clients accumulate, but what they retain that is important. For this reason, we are always tax aware in our manager selection and portfolio development process.
Proactive hiring/firing of managers
MDE employs a comprehensive process of ongoing quantitative and qualitative due diligence in the hiring and firing of investment managers. We have a bias against making rash decisions to fire managers for short periods of underperformance, but managers not meeting our high expectations will ultimately be replaced.
Performance reporting and Coordinated Asset Management
MDE reports regularly to our clients on the performance of the strategies and managers that make up their portfolios, along with performance at the style, asset class, and overall portfolio levels.
We can also incorporate clients' investment accounts held outside of MDE into our reporting system to provide a more holistic view of the asset allocation and performance of our clients' broader investment portfolio. This also allows us to better facilitate allocation changes and help keep our clients' portfolios appropriately invested based upon changing economic circumstances.
