Approach

How does Riggs Wealth Management approach money?

Money Buys Choices

It’s not about accumulating wealth. It’s about buying choices!

In 1885, the founder of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Charles H. Dow, began to study and observe stock market price movements. (The Point and Figure Method, Villiers and Talyor, 1934). Thus began the creation of the Point and Figure style of technical analysis.

The basics have not changed. The charts can be done by hand. No optimization required.

In 2001 I left the big Wall Street brokerage firms and went independent. I was looking for tools to help me manage money. My industry does not teach one to manage money, only to sell the products they make. I have vivid memories of a manager at Merrill Lynch telling me “we have the best research in the industry, get out there and sell it”.

I never did like that guy.

Today I buy my research from a firm in Richmond Virginia called Dorsey Wright and Associates. They have continued to expand the uses of Point and Figure Charting to include Relative Strength measurements. Relative Strength allows us to update and compare over 7 million charts every night and then rank them to create a matrix.

We can now rank broad asset classes, like Cash, US Stocks, Bonds, International Stocks, Currencies and Commodities to see where the broad strength lies and what to overweight/underweight. We can then look within those asset classes to look at sectors and individual securities.

We look for strength to buy, weakness to avoid.

Today, the world is my oyster. I can pick and choose securities from all asset classes, from around the globe, to build and manage your money.

I do not subscribe to the magic pie chart style of investing that was created with modern portfolio theory. I have been through too many recessions and bear markets where they simply did not work. My clients never seemed to care that we were down less than the market. They simply did not want to be down at all!

So it is not about outperforming some obscure index. It is not about reallocating among your pie chart holdings. It is about knowing what parts of the world’s financial markets are working now, and putting money into that trend. I am not saying that we do not have losses. Yes, we do. But when a holding loses its leadership position, it gets replaced.

I am happy to get online with you and show you how it works.