Risk Management
Fairview Capital is always looking for ways to mitigate and manage risk to improve
our clients’ financial well-being and overall peace of mind.
Goal-based financial planning
We educate clients on the financial risks embedded in their long-term life and lifestyle goals. We start with financial planning, which informs critical investment decisions such as asset allocation and liquidity needs. While we emphasize the long-term benefits of consistent and disciplined savings, we also seek to integrate into our planning major spending decisions such as the financing and purchase of a home or the education of a child or grandchild.
Our financial planning models give clients an ongoing assessment of achieving their financial and lifestyle goals, and we counsel clients in how to improve their probability of success. We stress test their financial planning to help them understand the impact of major spending or savings decisions and assess the impact of potentially lower long-term financial asset returns.
Long-term Relationships and Trust
Clients hire and trust us to run our business in their best interest. We are fiduciaries, and our business philosophy is to hire excellent people and create an environment that builds a long-term team. Each client has multiple advisors who understand their situation and goals. Clients take great comfort in working with familiar Fairview personnel for years and knowing Fairview is there for multiple generations of a family’s needs.
Investment Risk
We define investment risk as the potential for a permanent loss of capital. Unlike the temporary decline in value resulting from periodic volatility, the permanent impairment of capital can structurally disrupt progress toward investment goals. If one doesn’t need to sell when prices are low, then volatility can be endured—thus the rationale for establishing liquidity needs at the inception of the relationship.
Clients often believe that price volatility is synonymous with risk. We counsel clients to differentiate between the two concepts. Volatility simply represents the change in the price of an asset. On a day-to-day or month-to-month basis, nearly all asset prices fluctuate. Some asset prices change more than others (stocks v. bonds, for example) and some periods present more volatility than others (the dot-com era, the financial crisis, etc.). In contrast to conventional thinking, volatility is actually the friend of the well informed, long-term investor because it enables high-quality assets to be purchased at prices well below underlying intrinsic value and to be sold at prices above intrinsic value. With this framework in mind, we need not be concerned with the daily whims of the market.
