Investment Advisory & Management

Investors are greeted by challenges every day. They are faced with conflicting opinions from the media on whether to expect higher or slower economic growth, higher or lower equity return and understanding the fast paced changes in market index numbers...all while trying to balance family and professional lives. First Foundation Advisors exists to reduce the pressures of trying to do it all yourself and to enhance your returns over time. To enhance returns in challenging environments and to reduce risk, we have developed a state of art investment platform and strive to provide actionable advice and results oriented solutions for our clients.

Focus on Clients

We focus first and foremost on each client's objective when designing and managing portfolios. By providing unbiased advice, we seek to preserve yet grow our clients' wealth over time. Throughout each step of the investment process, we act as stewards of clients' capital, making decisions in their best interest to achieve investment goals.

Optimum Value

As part of our role as advisors, we are committed to understanding and controlling costs charged to clients by other institutions whether for custody, brokerage or investment management. We also consider the cost vs. benefit analysis in selecting investment vehicles by asset class for active management versus passive exposure.

Since our professionals do not receive commissions, all buying and selling decisions are based solely on what is best for our clients. We actively manage portfolios, striving to minimize overall transaction fees, and provide valuable personal service at a fair and competitive fee.

We focus on achieving higher returns than the asset class indices measured on both an after-tax and after-fee basis. As most client investments are taxable portfolios, we focus on after-tax returns in sub-asset class allocation, active and methodical tax loss harvesting and tax-efficient investment techniques.

The Process

The First Foundation Investment process is a disciplined, forward-thinking three-step approach:

1. Develop Client's Investment Policy Statement

We begin with a statement of objectives or investment policy statement as the foundation for designing each clientâ€™s portfolio. We focus on identifying client-specific solutions that consider individual tax sensitivities, risk tolerance, time horizon, income needs and other portfolio guidelines. Our clients' goals often reflect their desire to:

- Protect major assets and lifestyles over time
- Provide for their family and future generations
- Provide strategic philanthropy benefits to the community at large

2. Analyze and Build

After the client's objectives are clearly defined, our portfolio team uses analytical expertise in the selection of securities and investment managers to build the portfolio. In building client portfolios we consider the portfolio's allocation to the investment markets using individual assets, "best in class" mutual and open architecture investment management platforms.

3. Ongoing Management

Our goal is to deliver excellent investment results consistent with the client's desired level of risk. By offering a combination of proprietary core investment capabilities complemented by selected mutual funds and sub advisors, we strive to use the optimum diversification overall market cycles to achieve client goals.