• Our Process

    night time view of Boston

Our Process Begins and Ends with You

You are at the center of our process. We thoroughly examine your current financial picture while learning about your goals, concerns, and anything else that could affect the strategy we develop.

Below is a deeper look into our process.

We Consider Cash Flow, Portfolio Growth, and Risk Management

SCS applies a proprietary financial model that incorporates our long-term asset class return expectations with year-by-year changes in your income, spending, taxes, gifting, and other financial activities. This allows us to project potential future portfolio outcomes based on any combination of changes to the model’s inputs.

Our team examines whether a particular asset allocation program is appropriate for your portfolio growth objectives over the long term, net of spending, taxes (if any), and fees, both on a nominal basis and after adjusting for the eroding effects of inflation.

To enhance our perspective, we also analyze the risk of the modeled portfolios based on how the asset class portfolio would have behaved during actual historical periods of market stress. This leads directly to an interactive discussion of whether portfolio return objectives are consistent with your appetite for portfolio volatility.

The model allows us to tangibly show you how changes to the inputs for cash flow, market risk/return, tax, or asset allocation could affect the long-term growth potential and risk characteristics of your investment portfolio. Since clients often possess many accounts, we’ll repeat this process so that we can build a customized portfolio for each account you have.

We Rely on Qualitative Judgment That Sharpens the View

No quantitative model can fully incorporate all factors that influence an asset allocation plan. For this reason, we also spend a great deal of time discussing your desire for liquidity, your investment perspective, and other qualitative issues that we must consider before executing an investment program.

For questions or more information about our Private Client Group or other topics, please contact us.