Wealth Management

At Avatar, LLC our focus, first and foremost, is on managing risk. Why? Because the “buy and hold” strategies that worked in the past have proven inadequate for 21^st Century challenges:

• From 2000-02 the S&P declined 47%; the NASDAQ declined 78%.
• From 2007-09 the S&P declined 56%.

*Data is from Yahoo Finance

The Fallout: A Lost Decade and More….

“This example is for illustrative purposes only.”

For a buy and hold investor it took almost 13 years, from March 2000-January 2013, just to recover what they had lost in these downturns. They made nothing and would have seriously depleted their nest egg had they taken money out for retirement or emergencies.

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Since bottoming out in March 2009, the S&P has gone on a 7-year bull market run that has more than tripled its value. It traded near its all-time high at a time when corporate profits declined 18% from their peak levels.

Additionally, two major sources boosted its climb:

• The Fed’s quantitative easing
• Corporate stock buybacks

The Key Ingredient: Tactical Management

Clearly they didn’t achieve such results with a buy and hold or asset allocation strategy. Instead, they all relied on their proprietary, tactically managed trading platforms to help guide their investment decisions: when to be in the market, when to go “risk-off” to cash, and even when to hedge and possibly make money when markets were declining.