Our Investment Process

A Five-Step Approach

At Horizon Investment Group, our goal is to better position clients’ portfolios for accumulation, preservation, and distribution of wealth. Our investment process offers our clients access to the knowledge, resources, and experience of professional investment managers while receiving ongoing guidance from us, your investment adviser representatives.

We employ a five-step process that identifies your goals, constructs an Investment Policy Statement, implements the investment plan, and periodically monitors it for effectiveness through market cycles.

We follow certain standards of conduct while managing your portfolio, which can include offering diversification, analyzing risk and returns, tax reduction strategies, avoiding expenses that are not justified by your needs, and delegating duties where specialized assistance is needed.

The goals and needs of each client are unique. Investment returns and time horizons that you desire can be quite different from those of other clients. The general process that we follow together includes these five steps:

Understanding Your Goals and Needs

In the first step, we take the time to learn about your needs and objectives. We guide you through a series of questions that can help clarify your current financial position, investment goals, and outlook. This evaluation also gives you a complete picture of your risk tolerance, time horizon, and cash flow needs. By understanding your current situation and your goals, we can develop a strategy that bridges today’s reality with tomorrow’s objectives.

Developing Your Investment Policy Statement

Following, we will create an Investment Policy Statement, which outlines how your account should be managed. This document usually summarizes risk tolerance, time horizon, asset allocation, fund selection and the rebalancing criteria by which your accounts are managed. This can serve as your blueprint for potential investment success.

Designing Your Portfolio

When your investment objectives are clear, we can develop possible investment allocation strategies. Strategies are selected for optimal asset allocation,* which can be the most important decision affecting your long-term investment performance. How assets are dispersed among various asset classes can have more impact on performance than the selection of a specific mutual fund, stock or bond within an asset class.

Implementing Your Plan

With a wide range of investments in a flexible investment platform, we will customize your portfolio by selecting investments such as mutual funds, exchange traded funds (ETFs), stocks and bonds that we believe will best help you achieve your investment objectives.

Conducting Periodic Portfolio Reviews

Once a plan is set in place, we continually monitor your portfolio. We also provide a periodic review that encompasses investment objectives and portfolio performance to help ensure that progress is being made toward your original goals.

*Asset allocation, which is driven by complex mathematical models, should not be confused with the much simpler concept of diversification. Asset allocation does not assure a profit and does not protect against loss.