Supporting you in meeting your fiduciary responsibility.
Serving as the fiduciary expert from advising plan fiduciaries to making investment selections and managing investment portfolios.
Our Essence of Being…
ERISA Investment Fiduciary Expert
We act either as a fiduciary consultant advisor serving as a co-fiduciary, or as a discretionary fiduciary manager taking on full responsibilities.
ERISA 3(21) Investment Advisor
We act as the investment consultant to the plan sponsor or plan administrator. We provide ongoing fiduciary investment advice and to assist the plan sponsor in meeting its fiduciary responsibility under ERISA. We also assist in developing a prudent process to managing plan assets to include the developing and maintenance of an Investment Policy Statement (IPS). An important responsibility of a plan sponsor is to meet its duty to monitor. In addition to investment monitoring, we assist in monitoring the services and the costs of service providers as well as consulting on plan design best practices based on the objectives of the plan sponsor.
ERISA 3(38) Discretionary Investment Manager
When we are appointed in this role, we take on the full fiduciary responsibility to design and maintain an Investment Policy and to elect and monitor all plan investment options. Although the plan sponsor remains responsible to monitor our services, we are liable for our investment decisions.
Separately, we can serve as the plan consultant to assist in monitoring the services and the costs of service providers as well as consulting on plan design best practices based on the objectives of the plan sponsor.
Fiduciary investing, under defined contribution plan context, is not about identifying the lowest cost investments nor identifying yesterday’s winners. The overriding objective is to serve solely in the interest of the participants. This means identifying a group of prudent investment options that offer each participant the access to construct a personalized, risk appropriate and diversified long-term portfolio.
News & Commentaries
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Quarterly Market Commentary – 2024 Q1
What's Morphed in 2024Q1? It’s all about inflation and the Fed’s interest rate reaction function. From the absence of forward guidance to the incessant data dependency – understandably in a time of uncertainty – the Fed is feeling its way to a landing. In the prepared...
Quarterly Market Commentary – 2023 Q4
2023 reminds me of the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” movie. The most anticipated hard landing or recession did not happen even after a rapid 525bp increase in interest rates since 2022. Chair Powell said that the FOMC is “navigating by the stars under cloudy...
Quarterly Market Commentary – 2023 Q3
Executive Summary The first half of the year was full of hope that inflation will continue to decelerate and thus the Fed will take its foot off the rate hiking gas. The scenario of a soft landing fast became the (desired) base case. This is the immaculate...