John W. Gustafson

Beacon Trust focuses on preserving and enhancing client's wealth through personalized financial planning and investment management, keeping their client’s best interests first. The firm’s investment solutions include internal, proprietary strategies as well as access to external institutional managers with unique offerings. Steadfast attention to their market and economic outlook is key drivers of their decision making. Portfolios are constructed to meet financial objectives while maintaining diversity, flexibility and nimbleness.

MLAM's worldwide approach to equity investing uses a philosophy of identifying relative value among individual stocks and stock markets by focusing primarily on two variables: reinvestment rate and the price-to-book value ratio. There are seven additional screens employed to further refine the process. The factors used to identify value include price-to-cash flow, price-to-earnings ratios, past and future earnings growth and dividend payouts. For asset allocation, a country whose market valuation measurements seem consistently above or below world averages or its own historical averages are over or under-weighted accordingly. The degrees of over or under-weighting are determined by relative economic prospects as measured by the outlook for GNP, inflation and interest rates of each country and their impact on currency movements. By combining a value approach to individual stock selection with asset allocation by country, the firm seeks to achieve consistent performance relative to international equity indexes. MLAM combines top-down and bottom-up analysis and uses proprietary models as part of their research process. Their funds are team-managed.