Expert Sources: Top Financial Advisors Spencer Sherman and Brent Kessel of Abacus Wealth Partners Discuss Proven Strategies for Creating Wealth
What are the hot stocks and mutual funds for 2007 and how do you find them? These are questions that many investors have today. Spencer Sherman and Brent Kessel of Abacus Wealth Partners, LLC (www.abacuswealth.com), however, have known the answer for more than 20 years: diversification and rebalancing.
Rather than poring over annual reports and other subjective market investment information, Spencer and Brent and their investment committee take a more disciplined and quantitative approach to creating a portfolio. This quantitative approach has kept emotion out of their investment decisions through good times and bad. Their approach of diversification rather than market timing is supported by more than 100 years of market performance analysis, and the approach helped rank Spencer or Brent among Worth magazine’s top financial advisors in the United States in 1998, ’99, 2002, ’05 and ’06.
“One of the most important initiatives investors should work on early this year is to rebalance their diversified portfolios to the percentages of various stocks, bonds, real estate and commodities that they originally defined in their diversification strategy,” said Spencer Sherman, CEO of Abacus Wealth Partners. “Rebalancing portfolios by taking profits from high-performing sectors and re-investing them in underperforming sectors is a discipline that many investors lack — because it taps into their fears of buying low and selling high — but it’s one of the most important disciplines for creating wealth. Emotion is one of the most destructive forces in the stock market.”
Spencer and Brent also point out that there is no proven method for selecting a successful active mutual fund because the funds that have performed best in previous years often have sub-par performance in subsequent years. The best investment strategy is to invest in a broad mix of stocks within many different asset classes. Spencer and Brent recommend 14 asset classes in their Rainbow Portfolio™, while most investors only have four asset classes, with the vast majority of their assets in large, domestic, blue-chip companies, which over time have performed worse than most other asset classes. Once investors realize that the formula for success is to create asset class targets instead of focusing on which stocks to buy, they can spend less time managing their portfolios and more time enjoying the activities that the additional returns enable.
Above and beyond creating diversified portfolios and providing investment management and financial planning services for their clients, Spencer and Brent also uniquely focus on areas that normally get little attention, such as: attitudes about money formed since childhood; how these attitudes affect the pursuit of money; how money affects relationships; and the links between money, philanthropy and happiness. They work with clients who want to achieve financial freedom and “change the world one portfolio at a time.”™
Spencer and Brent are engaging speakers and experts available for interviews about their investment advice for 2007. Please contact Todd Lane (tlane@graham-associates.com) if you are interested in interviewing Spencer Sherman or Brent Kessel of Abacus Wealth Partners.
Biography of Spencer Sherman, CEO of Abacus Wealth Partners
Spencer helps business and spiritual leaders, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists make major life and business decisions. A few of his areas of expertise are philanthropic and charitable planning; generational planning; cash flow and “second half” planning; creating low-cost, tax-efficient, low volatility investment portfolios (including socially screened portfolios); couples and money, and business consulting.
Spencer was born and raised in New York City. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brandeis University in 1983 (Phi Beta Kappa), an M.B.A. in Finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, and the CFP® designation in 1990. Since starting his firm in 1987, he has been widely quoted in the financial press and on television. He co-leads workshops for couples and singles called “Financial Intimacy and Freedom.” He has created presentations on “Increasing Philanthropic Contributions of Your Clients” and “Transforming Our Money Conditioning.” Spencer was selected to write the chapter “Money: the Surprising Aphrodisiac” in an anthology on relationships with Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Scott Peck, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others.
Spencer was named one of the top 100 wealth advisors in the United States by Worth magazine in 2006 and 2005. (He was named by Worth to their list of top 250 advisors in 1999 and to their list of top 300 in 1998.) Bloomberg Money Manager listed him as one of their top money managers in 2005, 2003, and 2002, and Medical Economics listed him as one of the 150 best advisors for doctors in 2004, 2002, 2000, and 1998. He was also named by the Philadelphia Business Journal as one of the top 40 under (age) 40 business leaders in Philadelphia in 1999. Spencer is a member of the Social Venture Network as well as the Social Investment Forum.
Spencer has appeared on CNBC’s “Make Your Money Work” with Bill Griffith, and on Philadelphia’s “NBC 10 News” where he cut up his credit cards on the air.
Biography of Brent Kessel, president of Abacus Wealth Partners
As a fee-only financial advisor and investment manager, Brent counsels business owners, senior executives, retirees, philanthropists, inheritors and other individuals facing transformational financial change in their lives (often involving the sale of a business, inheritance, divorce, retirement or some other sudden increase in financial assets). His wealth management specialties include concentrated stock and options, real estate, and constructing low-cost, tax-efficient, low volatility investment portfolios (including socially screened portfolios).
Brent earned his economics degree from UCLA with a minor emphasis in psychology and holds the CFP® designation. A leader in his field, Brent uniquely bridges the disparate worlds of finance and spirituality. In 1998, he began combining the financial and spiritual perspectives in a more public way. After being trained by two veteran financial planners to lead their workshops on the inner dimensions of money, he created his own, “The Yoga of Money.” He has since led popular workshops on money and personal growth around the country and given trainings for dozens of financial advisors and speeches at major financial conferences to rave reviews.
Dubbed a “Financial Soul Searcher” by Research magazine, Brent has been widely quoted in national publications such as BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, CBS Marketwatch, Dow Jones, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Sun Tribune, Bloomberg Wealth Manager, The Journal of Financial Planning, Investment News, Ticker and Financial Planner. His work on spirituality and money has also been featured in Yoga Journal and Newsweek, and he has been profiled in the books “Silver Spoon Kids” and “The Inheritor’s Handbook.” In 2002, Brent was named one of the top 250 financial advisors in the United States by Worth magazine.
Media Contact:
Todd Lane
Graham & Associates
(415) 986-7212
SOURCE: Abacus Wealth Partners
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