Our Process

Building Trust ...

Every healthy advisor-client relationship begins with trust. At Capital Advisors, three decades of experience working with clients reinforces our understanding that we must execute three responsibilities to earn and maintain our clients' trust:

  1. Understand the unique investment objectives and risk constraints of every client portfolio
  2. Execute an investment strategy appropriate for those objectives and constraints
  3. Measure and report on the results

Understand the Objective ...

We achieve our first responsibility to clients - understanding their investment objective - through disciplined execution of a highly efficient financial planning process. Our planning process focuses on the key variables that determine return objectives and risk constraints for an investment portfolio, while eliminating complexity beyond these primary factors.

Execute the Right Strategy ...

Once our planning process has defined an appropriate risk-reward profile for an investor we put the portfolio "on-course" by matching it with an appropriate investment strategy. Portfolio managers can customize a blend of our individual portfolio strategies into any combination that produces a tight match with the unique objectives and constraints of each client assignment.

Measure the Results ...

Our third responsibility involves the measurement and reporting of investment results in ways that enable informed choices for clients about the return expectations and risk characteristics of the portfolio strategies we offer.

Our comprehensive portfolio accounting system enables clients to maintain multiple investment strategies within a single custodian account, eliminating the need for multiple statements, contracts, proxies, etc., even if a client participates in all six of our portfolio strategies.

Our disclosure of portfolio characteristics goes well beyond the "industry standard" presentation of historical average returns and volatility. We believe the more comprehensive portfolio analytics we share with investors offers insights into important characteristics of investment risk and reward that can be inadequately addressed by industry-standard portfolio reporting.

For example, the historical data we provide can help investors address questions like:

  • What has been the frequency of negative returns for a strategy over any given holding period during the past 20-years?
  • What was the frequency of achieving at least an 8.0% annualized return over various holding periods during the last 20-years?
  • What was the worst 12-month return...three-year return...or five-year return over the past 20-years?
  • What was the best 12-month return...three-year return...or five-year return over the past 20-years?
  • How did a strategy perform during the recession in 1990-91...the boom-and-bust in technology stocks between 1997 and 2002...or the crisis in the financial sector more recently?

Answers to questions like these are supported by over 20-years of historical study for most of the portfolio strategies we offer.