As Registered Investment Advisors with broad expertise and a contrarian philosophy, we specialize in bringing a wide variety of unusual investment opportunities to our clients – opportunities investors do not often see. And because we operate as our own independent broker-dealer, we are uniquely positioned to find such investments and to provide our clients access to opportunities that would not be presented by other investment advisors.

Contrarian ideas are often overlooked by investors. Because we are independent and do independent investment research, we are not much influenced by Wall Street’s thinking and do not follow the herd. With extensive experience and a skeptical outlook, we constantly seek out-of-favor investments that offer substantial upside potential, often with surprisingly low risk.

We have expertise in a number of types of real estate investment subclasses to which few investment advisors pay attention. Among the investment categories to which we can provide access are direct real estate and real estate investment trusts (REIT’s). Late in 1999, believing that REIT’s were substantially undervalued, we began to build REIT positions in client portfolios. We continued to build client positions in these assets in 2000, 2001 and 2002 so that many of our portfolios had allocations to REIT’s that exceeded 25% of the entire portfolio during these years.

We performed extensive due diligence and found that we preferred REIT’s that were not the largest most popular REIT’s, but that paid dividends in excess of 7.5%. As it turned out, all eight of the REIT’s we recommended to clients outperformed the REIT Index from 2000 – June 30, 2003. Several ranked among the best performing REIT’s during this period. Almost all returned 20%+ per year to our clients, returns we are not likely to see again for some time.

Over the past year, while the so-called “experts” were advising investors to abandon real estate because the “bubble” had burst, we were still allocating over 20% of client portfolios to REIT’s – with extremely favorable results. We continue to believe that the REIT’s we like will pay dividends of 7% or more and will appreciate at least 3 – 5% per year.

Preferred stocks have also been a very successful investment for us, especially at times when equities were performing poorly. Over the past two years, the preferred stocks in our client portfolios have paid dividends of 7.5% or higher and are offered by companies with substantial cash flows. In fact, these companies have been strong enough financially to take advantage of the lower interest rates in the third quarter of 2003 and call these higher-dividend preferred stocks (paying them off) and issuing new preferred stocks with lower coupons. We seek companies that have very solid earnings, trade in a narrow range (to reduce volatility and risk), and are not likely to reduce or suspend the dividend. Many of these companies are also REIT’s.

We also utilize asset classes to which few investment advisors provide access to their clients. Asset classes such as venture capital opportunities, metals and hedging strategies are part of our portfolios.

Thanks to our extensive connections and hands-on research, we can diversify our clients far more extensively than most financial advisors are capable of doing, and bring them viable investment opportunities that have low correlations to the stock market.