Season’s Greetings

Every year, in the spirit of the Holiday Season, Sellwood Consulting invites its employees to research, nominate, and vote on one local charity to receive an annual donation on behalf of each of our clients. This year our employees elected to support Outside In‘s mission “to help homeless youth and other marginalized people become healthy and self-sufficient.”

Thoughts on the “Brexit”

UK voters shocked the world last night by voting, in a surprise, to leave the European Union. The nation will be the first to leave the 28-nation bloc, The vote was followed by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement that he will resign, and by global equity markets declining meaningfully. In the UK itself, substantial losses early in the day have partially reversed course,

It’s No Secret: The Importance of a Defined Investment Philosophy

We would like to share with you our secret formula for delivering superior investment advice. Few other investment advisory firms share it, and most clients overlook its importance. This secret formula allows us to recommend better managers, avoid the common mistakes we see our peers making, and deliver client portfolios that regularly outperform their benchmarks and peers.

2016 Capital Market Assumptions

Sellwood Consulting’s 2016 Capital Market Assumptions are available. These 10-year forward looking assumptions of asset class return, risk, and correlation are the key input variables for our client asset allocation work, including mean-variance optimization, Monte Carlo analysis, and risk budgeting.

2016 Day of Service

We spent the morning of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day 2016 planting trees in our local community with Friends of Trees. Despite a foreboding forecast, the skies remained clear and the soil dry for our volunteers to plant bare root trees, shrubs, and live stakes in a nearby park.

Happy Holidays from Sellwood Consulting

This holiday season, we gave back to our community in two ways. First, our staff spent half of a day volunteering at MacDonald Center, a Portland nonprofit organization whose mission is to “nurture the body, mind and spirit of the forgotten poor in Old Town-Downtown Portland by building connections and community.”

Common-Sense Investment Manager Research

There are too many investment managers in the world, and one of our primary tasks is identifying the very slim minority of them that deserve to manage our clients’ assets.
In 1991, William Sharpe published The Arithmetic of Active Management, in which he persuasively concluded, because all markets are a zero-sum game between buyers and sellers, that “properly measured, the average actively managed