Ask most people when their portfolio was last actually looked at — not glanced at on a statement, but examined, position by position, by someone responsible for it — and the honest answer is usually "the last review meeting." That might be three months ago. It might be a year.
We think that's the biggest quiet problem in this industry, so we built our practice around fixing it.
The standard
Every holding in every account we manage gets rechecked every market day. Not a scan of the account balance — a recheck of the actual companies and funds: what moved, why it moved, whether anything changed about the reasons we own it.
Most days, the answer is "nothing changed." That's fine. That's most days. The point of overwatch isn't constant action — it's that when something does change, someone who knows your accounts sees it the same day, not at the next quarterly review.
Receipts, not vibes
Watching daily only matters if you're honest about what you see. So we write things down before we act, not after.
When we buy something, the reasons go on paper first: what the business is, why the price makes sense, what would make us wrong. When we sell, same thing. And then — this is the part almost nobody does — we go back later and grade ourselves. Did the thing we worried about actually happen? Was the sale right, or did we get spooked?
Some of those grades are humbling. We've sold positions that went on to recover, and we keep the record of it, because the record is how the process gets better. An advisor who can't tell you about a call they got wrong isn't an advisor without wrong calls. They're an advisor without receipts.
What you see
Every Monday, our clients get a note: what happened last week, what's coming this week, what we're keeping an eye on. Written in plain English, specific to the things they actually own. Not a market newsletter with your name mail-merged into it.
That note exists because of the daily work. You can't write specifically about someone's holdings every week unless you actually looked at them every day.
Why we're telling you this
Because it's checkable. Ask any advisor — including us — three questions:
When was my portfolio last reviewed, position by position? What's your process for noticing when something changes mid-quarter? Can you show me the written reasons for something you bought me, dated before you bought it?
Those questions have factual answers. If the answers are fuzzy, that tells you something. Ours aren't, and if you'd like to see what that looks like on your own accounts before committing to anything, that's exactly what the Test Drive is for.
The information in this article is general in nature and is not intended as specific investment advice. All investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.