No Individual Equities, Please

One thing that Scheffler has no interest in for any of his strategies is individual equities. “We don’t think the marketplace needs any more money managers that just buy individual stocks,” he says. “What the market desperately needs are money managers that have the flexibility to identify whether the market is favorable for stocks, or whether the market if favorable for real estate or bonds or cash or even defensive pieces. That’s what the market really needs. The S&P has been essentially flat now for the better part of seven years. Nobody signs up for that. Nobody signs up for an issue where we have to wait for seven years. We’ve been able to essentially reduce that waiting period to get to profitability in as little as a year. We’ve never had back-to-back losing years and we’ve been successful at limiting our losses to low- to mid-single digits when we do lose money and again, that’s made all the difference in the world.”