Strategies for the high net worth investor - portfolio management

Black Enterprise, August, 1994 by Gracian Mack

You can command a premium table at any of the better restaurants without a reservation. Your wife drags her mink fashionably across the floor. Your kids go to private schools, and even the dog is a graduate of an elite canine academy.

These are the trappings of success. As an individual with high net worth you are sophisticated enough to know that your money has better things to do than languish in a bank gathering a dusty 3.77% in interest on a 12-month certificate of deposit.

Instead, industry experts say your brokerage account should be aimed at getting institutional service on your retail account. But how do you qualify? The answer de ends on who you talk to. "When your investment income alone is enough to support your current lifestyle," is the philosophical approach of money manager Vernon J. Brown of V. Brown & Co., in White Plains, N.Y. "If you're a bus driver making $24,000 a year, but you have $300,000 in varying investments that return 10%, you're making $30,000, and I would say that you are rich."

But Harold E. Doley, chairman of Doley Securities Inc. in New Orleans, takes a hard-line approach. "According to the people who really make the rules, the banks and pension funds, high net worth individuals are those with half a million dollars income, minus assets and liabilities."

Philosophies and best guesses aside, the reality is that a full-service brokerage firm will ideally expect you to have a minimum of $250,000 in invested (or investable) assets in order to qualify you as a priority client. Once qualified, you get a variety of perks, such as individual investment counseling, free checking, a credit card, the privilege of trading on a margin-but the combination of these favors may change depending on the firm and the type of account you open. Most brokerage houses, for example, will allow you to open a "wrap" account for between $100,000 and $250,000. This type of account charges you a fee based on the quarterly performance of your invested assets. Most other accounts charge a fee on a transaction basis, but a wrap account charges a flat 2.5% to 3% on equity and balance portfolio accounts and an approximate 1 3/4% charge for bond portfolios.

Now that you've got the cash, framed your investment strategy and opened the account, it's time to build your portfolio. According to Brown, a balanced portfolio should contain between 15 and 20 stocks for an adequate mix of investment and maintain an efficient way to track stock performance. Diversification mitigates risk in the stock market and is essential to a well constructed portfolio.

Ideally, similar amounts of capital should be invested in a diversified selection of undervalued, blue-chip stocks like Wal-Mart, PepsiCo or Southwestern Energy. Say you have $10,000 to invest. You might invest approximately $2,000 each in five different stocks to achieve a balanced, diversified portfolio. The number of shares you buy is not as important as keeping the number of dollars similar in each original purchase. This way, you'll be able to keep track of which stocks are the best performers, and if one choice slides, your entire

Ron Scott, president and CEO at recently formed Nubian Asset Management in New York City, recommends a portfolio mix of 60% equity, 30% bonds and 10% cash. Nubian, the newest minority-owned asset management firm on Wall Street, was formed in association with the 118-year-old investment firm of Ladenburg, Thalmann & Co. Inc.

There is no way to determine at the beginning which stocks will be the best performers, but with your own independent research and advice from trustworthy experts you can weed out the dogs.

Brown says he conducts three quick tests when searching for an undervalued stock: Does it have a high price/earnings ratio; what is the stock's history over the last 36 weeks; and finally what is the cyclical performance of the company and the industry as a whole.

Scott agreed with that assessment process, adding, "I am a growth oriented kind of guy, so I'm looking at companies that grow at 30% to 40% per year. I think the telecommunications industry is very attractive. The stocks in that sector are generally discounted ... plus you have to look at what the insiders buy. Look at LDDS (NASDAQ-$18.375)."

in the past year and a half, LDDS Communications, a long-distance telephone service provider, has gone from thinly traded obscurity to become a rising star of the telecommunications sector.

In that time LDDS acquired three companies-Dial-Net, Touch I Long Distance and Tritel-for a total of $100 million in additional revenues. LDDS also closed a merger agreement with Metromedia and Resurgens, in September 1993.