Investment Management

Common Mistakes

Successful investing requires both objectivity and discipline. However, too many investors let their emotions dictate decisions, leading them to buy and sell at the wrong time. In effect, they see less overall return.

How Main Avenue Financial Services (MAFS) Can Help

Main Avenue Financial Services (MAFS) keeps a long-range perspective on your specific investment needs while offering financial advice on your optimal bonds, stocks or mutual funds portfolio. In fact, we will create your very own Investment Guidelines Statement (IGS) factoring in your goals, risk tolerance and timeframe to determine your ideal overall asset allocation and investment approach.

We offer passive as well as active investment management, depending on your unique desires. For passive management, we use Exchange Traded Index Funds (ETFs). For active management, we use the third-party money manager Morningstar Investment Services.

Active vs. Passive Investment Management

Investors can choose active or passive investment management.

Active portfolio managers research and analyze economic forces to determine portfolio allocation and fund screening processes that determine the most profitable stocks, bonds and mutual funds to place in a portfolio. Furthermore, they monitor and change investments as deemed necessary.

Passive portfolio managers aim to achieve market returns by investing in broad sectors of the market—or asset classes without any forecasting or emotional involvement. This strategy does not imply a buy-and-ignore approach, as a portfolio periodically requires rebalancing. Rather, they sell asset classes performing better than expected and buy lagging asset classes, essentially meaning they buy low and sell high.

Asset Allocation

Whether you choose active or passive portfolio management, you cannot “loss-proof” a portfolio—all investments involve risk. Successful investing requires designing and maintaining a long-term investment strategy based on your specific situation with asset allocation that diversifies your risk over many asset categories for varying results.

We only know that we do not know the future of financial markets. However, we still need to invest for the future. With appropriate asset allocation, we eliminate the risk of investing in the wrong market at the wrong time (think the dot-com market in the early 2000s). Although asset allocation is not an exciting investment strategy, it is proven in generating the majority of gain in long-term investing.

Fees

MAFS charges fees based on a percentage of assets under management. See our current Fee Schedule