>> My name is Peggy Flynn and I'm the Director of Research at Wescoff Financial Advisory Group.
And what I do is I work on the investments for the firm.
I work on the model portfolios and I develop asset allocation strategies, manager strategies,
and I monitor the performance of all the funds.
And I monitor what's going on in the market and economy.
On a daily basis, I read The Wall Street Journal.
I pay attention to what's going on in the economy to economic indicators.
And I also look at our portfolio and I look at all the managers.
And we -- I follow about 60 managers.
So next week I'm actually going to Denver and Houston.
So what I'm doing this week is I'm preparing for those meetings.
So I'm looking at the portfolios, the stocks, the sectors.
Kind of what performed well and what didn't perform well.
And I'm preparing questions for those managers when I go down and meet with them.
And for instance, one of the managers has about 40 percent in emerger [phonetic] markets
and right now emerger markets are not performing well.
And he has another 50 percent of the portfolio in 10 stocks.
And his top stock position has a weighting of about 10 percent.
All of those things result in a highly risky portfolio and he's underperforming.
So my question to him is going to be kind
of what is your strategy and how do you mitigate risk?
Because right now it's not working.
What I do with that data is then I come back and make an assessment and say whether
or not we should make a change in that manager or just keep things status quo.
And one of the things I constantly do is on a weekly basis, I look at the performance of all
of the models and all of the manager strategies.
And I'm constantly trying to look at who's underperforming, who's not performing,
and is there any reason to be concerned about any of our models, any of our strategies,
and what's going on in the market?
And whether or not we should take any action.
For the most part, we do include new managers.
For instance, right now we've just added a lot of new alternative strategies but a lot
of my day to day activity is not actually making changes in the portfolio
but just monitoring the portfolio and making sure things are okay.
The other thing that I do on a quarterly basis is when the quarter's over I meet
with the investment committees and we go over all the performance and I have
to present the performance to the committee
and present any recommendations that I'd like to change.
And the other thing I do as well is I put together material for the clients.
And I put together more economic talking points for the financial advisors.
And some of the things that we put -- we prepare a written piece for all of our clients.
It's probably about 50 pages long and we include market and economic outlook pieces
and also performance on all the managers and all the strategies as well as investment articles.
And the latest investment article I wrote was on gold.
And as you know gold has been performing very, very well but recently it's had a downturn
but it was kind of our assessment of where do we have gold
in the portfolio and should we be adding to gold.
Should we have a specific strategy in gold?
And if not, why?
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