Integrity
Education, experience, and work ethic are all important when evaluating someone to manage your investments, but we believe the most critical attribute in an investment manager is integrity. To us, integrity is being trustworthy, fair, and dedicated in everything we do.
Proving one's integrity can only come with time, but we think there are several distinguishable and tangible signs of an investment manager with integrity. These are a few steps we have taken to establish integrity with our clients:
We chose to serve our clients as a Registered Investment Adviser, not as a broker-dealer.
REGISTERED
INVESTMENT
ADVISER
It's about putting our clients first, in every decision that we make.
As a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA), we are a fiduciary to all of our clients, regardless of which types of investment accounts they hold. Fiduciaries have a legal obligation to always act in their clients' best interests, and to disclose any potential conflicts of interest.
The other major class of investment manager is the broker-dealer. They are held to a lower standard of advice, the suitability standard, which merely requires them to make recommendations that are suitable in terms of the client’s financial needs, objectives, and unique circumstances. AlphaGlider is not a broker-dealer.
As a potential consumer of investment advice, we strongly recommend that you understand to which standard your prospective investment advisor is adhering, and how that may affect their objectivity.
We invest our own savings alongside yours.
It's about the alignment of our clients' interests and our own.
Our chief investment officer analyzes the investments in our strategies as if they were his own. And that's easy for him because most of his family's savings are invested in AlphaGlider strategies.
We are also incentivized to grow our clients' assets while managing their downside risk, as we are compensated on the value of assets we manage.
You could say we eat our own cooking.
We employ low, transparent pricing.
It's about being fair and truthful to our clients.
We are a fee-based adviser, getting paid in only one way, our investment advisory fee. We have kept our cost structure lean, allowing us to offer one of the lowest advisory fees in the field of active management, in an effort to maximize our clients investment returns.
We are completely independent from the fund management companies and custodians that we use, and we do not take backdoor payments from any of them.
We use independent custodians, Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. and my529.1
It's about trust.We do not hold your assets (i.e., in-house custody) but rather our clients hold their assets in accounts they own at an third-party custodian that is completely independent from AlphaGlider. Our clients allow us to trade securities our their behalf, initiate movement of funds between their like-registered accounts, and directly deduct our quarterly advisory fee. In no circumstances does the independent custodian allow us to deduct amounts in excess of our advisory fee.
Our independent, third-party custodians issue statements to our clients. We encourage our clients to verify that the information in these statements is consisent with the information provided in AlphaGlider's quarterly statements.
SEC Investment Adviser Public Disclosure
For your convenience, we provide the links to the Securities Exchange Commission's (SEC) Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website. You can use it to search publicly available background information on Investment Adviser Representatives (IARs), brokers, and their employers, such as current registration status, professional designations, past employment, criminal charges and convictions, formal investigations and disciplinary actions initiated by regulators, customer disputes and arbitrations, and financial disclosures such as bankruptcies and unpaid judgments or liens.