Management and Monitor

For a long time, long term investors would take a buy and hold strategy. With some of the financial crises we’ve had over the last ten years, this has not worked very well. Recently, some people have stuck their head in the sand and taken a “buy and pray perspective”. Neither one works. Somebody needs to pay attention to your portfolio on a daily or periodic basis. Do you have the time, priority or know what to watch for? Do you know what alerts or stop loss orders to use?

As many of our clients know, Quest Financial Services Inc. “lives, eats and sleeps” with the market changes every day that it is open. We try to maintain a broad perspective by understanding what the reasons are for certain actions happening. From early in the morning, we watch both Bloomberg and CNBC to see what the Pacific rim markets did overnight and what is happening in the European markets. Daily, we read the Wall Street Journal. Weekly, we subscribe to Barrons and the Investment News. Also there are monthly professional financial planning, tax, and accounting magazines. Periodically, both Schwab and Fidelity run online seminars with various fund managers to get their perspective. In addition, there are a number of professional conferences sponsored by Fidelity, Schwab, NAPFA, Financial Planning Association, Morningstar and the AICPA PFP technical conferences we attend to meet fund managers, understand the latest tools, products and to network with our peers from around the country and world. Finally, we are required to take at least 80 hours every two years of continued professional education and ethics for both the CPA and CFP® designations. Besides the educational and knowledge gained from the above sources, some of the best opportunities we have are various monthly meetings with fund managers when they come to our office or have a lunch meeting. We are able to get insight as to how they think, make their decisions and what makes them tick both on the positive and negative side. How many individual investors have this amount of input to understand and watch their investments?

On a daily basis we are focused on the financial markets. To start, we watch all the major indexes both national and international. Quest Financial Services Inc. tracks US Treasury rates at all levels, LIBOR rate, mortgage rates, corporate bonds, CDs, and money markets. Periodically, a wide group of business metrics are tracked from unemployment, GDP, housing starts, exports, money supply, inflation, etc., and more important, to understand what are the root causes to drive these changes. Perhaps the most important data we watch are the quarterly earnings reports and company forecasts for the coming year. All of the above data helps to give us a good perspective on the direction of the economy and what changes we should make in our investments.

One of the most important value added benefits of Quest Financial Services Inc. brings to our clients is our unique alert process for all our mutual fund investments along with our trailing stop loss orders. This is all part of our management and monitoring service. Can you afford to invest this much time and knowledge for your investments or do you want to buy and pray?