At West Oak Family Office, one of our guiding principles is to make our families lives easier, and we achieve that by protecting and growing the wealth of the families we serve. Some of that protecting and growing relates to ways we can create efficiencies from a tax perspective to keep more capital within the family or the family foundation. The other part of protecting and growing comes in the form of investment and portfolio management.
Our team is passionate about everything we do, and the combination of our experience, education, and always striving to improve, has culminated into a clear and concise investment and portfolio management platform that resonates with the families we work with. What this provides is consistent and predictable outcomes that coincide with the objectives that our families are trying to achieve.
Our philosophy is simple: use technology and qualitative factors to build investment mandates and portfolios that produce above average returns with below average risk. To do this, we take a two-pronged approach:
- Track data trends in economics, central bank and government policy, as well among various asset classes that help steer successful over-arching allocation decisions; and
- Invest in seasoned companies that demonstrate, and are likely to continue to demonstrate, strong fundamental characteristics that leads to better returns.
How we go about executing this philosophy is where things get interesting. West Oak invests heavily in technology and data applications, as well as independent institutional (non-biased) research to help drive decisions around where to position capital, and what companies to invest in.
Data analytics is changing the way we live our lives and creates opportunities to extract efficiencies across all sorts of social and business applications.
Data analytics is changing the way we live our lives and creates opportunities to extract efficiencies across all sorts of social and business applications. Our use of technology and data aggregation allows us to screen, track, measure and test large data sets to provide a clear picture as to how our process is functioning, if it is producing the outcomes we endeavor to achieve, if not then why, and if there are other factors that could potentially improve the risk/reward profile of our mandates and portfolios.
We have also began researching ways that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) may be able to enhance the returns in portfolios. Companies that create a more robust framework to expand on equality, environmental impact, and social good tend to lead those companies that don’t. While we are still in the infancy of impact and ESG investing, there is mounting evidence that it creates more successful outcomes for both shareholders and stakeholders. Stay tuned for more on this front.
Companies that create a more robust framework to expand on equality, environmental impact, and social good tend to lead those companies that don’t.
We are passionate about constantly improving and finding better ways or technologies to increase and protect the wealth of the families we serve. Our philosophy and process for managing our families hard earned capital is simple – produce consistent and reliable best in-class returns based on the outcomes our families endeavor to achieve. This is what we do best and is ultimately one of the most critical factors that our families come to rely on West Oak Family Office for.
