-: My name is Jenn Wilcox Thomas,
and I'm a portfolio manager at Hall Capital
Hall Capital is an investment management office.
What that means in practice is
we help families and foundations
figure out how to invest their money.
So folks come to us and we oversee
every bit of their investment world.
Figure out what their asset allocation should look like,
how should their risk tolerance liquidity
translate into an investment profile,
and then actually pick
which underlying investments should be in each portfolio.
Some of the key things that I focus on are,
first of all, really strong communication with my clients.
Making sure that for each of them,
I understand what their hopes, needs, dreams are,
and figure out how to translate that into their finances.
It also means that I need to be aware of
what's happening in the world,
what that means for markets,
and then how that eventually impacts
my clients' underlying portfolios.
Almost all of our clients have assets between
$100 million and $2 billion of investable wealth,
so we're dealing with folks who can pay their mortgages,
can get through their daily lives.
So a big piece of it is having conversations around
what do you want your legacy to be?
What's the right amount of money
to leave to your kids?
How do you think about philanthropy?
The average things I spend a lot of time thinking about
and spend a lot of energy on are
first of all, managing my team internally.
I have a number of different folks who report to me
for different clients,
and making sure that, talking to them,
I understand how they're thinking about
their lives and their futures,
and offering some career counseling and mentorship to them.
I also spend a lot of time trying to think through
each individual client's goals, hopes, and dreams,
how that translates into their actual investment portfolio,
and seeing what's changed in the world or in the markets
since the last time I looked carefully at the portfolio,
and making sure no adjustments are needed
or if they are, trying to figure out
who are the right people to talk to
to make those things happen.
And I spend a lot of time talking with our managers.
Working with folks who are actually buying and selling
bonds, real estate, stocks,
to get a sense of how they're seeing the world,
how they're thinking about the markets,
and how that might translate into position sizing
or different types of investments
in my clients' portfolios.