FAQ

Our advisory fee structure is a simple percentage of the assets in your account. We don’t charge commissions or transaction costs, and you’ll never get a hidden or unexpected fee charged to your account. Find out more about what to expect as a new client.

Charging an annual advisory fee based on the value of your account puts us on the same side of the table with you; simply: If your account value goes up, we earn more. If your account value goes down, we earn less.

The transfer process is very simple thanks to two things: The industry’s electronic transfer process (called ACATS) and our Concierge Administration (CA) team that walks you through the entire process from start to finish. Once you sign the forms to establish an account and transfer your assets, things run seemingly on automatic as our CA uses decades of experience in the transfer process.

Just give us instruction! We recommend that you are set up for electronic transfers (ACH) to your bank. Once set up, just give us as much lead time as possible and, generally, from the point you give us the instruction, depositing funds from your account via electronic ACH takes just 3 days (subject to banking changes on ACH guidelines).

Yes! Again, the Concierge Admin (CA) team simply needs to know how much and how often you expect your income to be available. Whether your income planning only involves investment returns or includes a portion of your principal, we can make it happen.

Again, very simple. Whether it’s recurring payments or just one-off needs, we can take or send money electronically (subject to the regulations of your bank or financial institution).

Depending on your account, your investment dollars are held at our Custodian firm (currently Charles Schwab) or at an insurance company in the case of insurance products. None of your funds are held in any way by WWM or its parent Worthington Financial Partners.

Yes, both directly and indirectly, depending on your account needs at the time. Because our business is based on Model Investing, every client enrolled in a Model has their account traded at the same instant. So, in this way, the size of your account is irrelevant and every client is treated equally. However, if your account has a specific circumstance – for instance: we’re investing new funds slowly – your account is tagged and handled directly by the reallocation/rebalancing process.

Singularity in decision-making. The model methodology allows an advisor to manage a model instead of individual client account strategies. By qualifying clients according to model parameters of risk tolerance, return needs, income desired and more, clients can both join an existing strategy and regulate how much of their account is used in each model.

We can establish a non-model account but there are natural drawbacks to doing so at our firm. For instance and among other impacts, model clients always receive priority in trade actions and order executions. Orders taken for non-model accounts are entered manually during the day they are received but will entered after model accounts have been traded. This fact may cause order execution price differences between model and non-model accounts.

Giving your advisor discretion means that you’re allowing transactions in your account(s) without contact from your advisor. Strictly, discretion requires no prior contact but, as a practice at WWM, you’ll likely be contacted shortly after a change is made to your holdings. Or we will have already talked about the plans for your account(s) and you’ll be expecting the activity. Although we require that you grant us discretion in order to have an account at WWM, we consider it mandatory that you’ll never have to say you didn’t know what was happening with your money. Our experience shows that clients can accept and handle a losing position periodically but rarely are we forgiven for our clients’ ignorance of what we’re doing.

There are many differences between these “channels” of investment and money management but, primarily, the distinction comes down to responsibility. Registered Investment Advisors (RIA firms) are full fiduciaries of your money whereas, mostly, brokerage firms and bank brokers operate under a different standard called “suitability”. A fiduciary is responsible for the client’s success whereas a broker or bank-broker is only responsible for “suitability” of the investments they recommend.

No, we have investment models for investors of all sizes. However, there are minimums to participate in our individual stock and bond product models. For example, our Macch-V model currently has over 50 securities and it takes a minimum dollar amount in order to purchase at least one share of each of the securities in the model. While we have solutions for all investors, products appropriate for smaller account sizes may carry additional nominal costs not associated with larger accounts.

Because Allocating for Alpha is, distinctly, not about a pretty pie chart with lots of slices! It’s about having more money exposed to what’s expected to go up and less in what’s not. Much of the advisory business, and most of the brokerage industry, use Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) as their framework, and MPT relies largely on the past performance of asset classes for its recommended allocations. Instead, Allocating for Alpha relies more on the future economic and fundamental expectations driving the markets. Allocation decisions are based on industry and sector expectations, technical analysis of current and past market trends, economic drivers, and socio-political circumstances and expectations. MPT generally uses expectations that are calculated once per year whereas our Allocating for Alpha process is dynamic every single day.