What makes us different?

• Our value proposition: Comprehensive financial planning makes real differences--both qualitative and quantitative--in clients' lives. 
• We integrate all areas of your life to enable you to meet your personal and financial goals more efficiently and effectively by focusing on understanding your current situation, prioritizing your goals and help you through each step in achieving those goals.
• We have a clearly defined investment strategy: We are diversified-asset class managers--using mainly mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.  Diversified portfolios sometimes under perform standard market benchmarks and occasionally experience negative return periods. But over a long time, a well diversified portfolio would always produce better returns with reduced volatility (i.e. increased risk-adjusted returns – returns without the big swings in the markets)
• Asset Allocation and Risk Tolerance Analysis. Any sensible investment program must begin here, with an understanding of your financial situation, goals, risk tolerance, and time horizon. Once this baseline is understood, the design of your personal portfolio - one that is suitable for your goals and appropriate for your risk tolerance, will become clear.  Understanding every client's capacity to take risks as well as every client's tolerance for taking risk is the first step in our investment management process.
• The development of portfolios that are customized to the needs of our clients. Our income portfolios range from conservative to very aggressive and their dividend/interest rates vary accordingly. Our income portfolios are generally designed to provide income on a monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual basis.
• The efficient management of client funds in their portfolios. We stress the term "management" here because we cannot and will not ever take custody of your funds. Your account is established, under our guidance, between you and our independent Custodian (generally Interactive Brokers). You control all deposits and withdrawals on your account. Sunrise manages the investment aspect of your account. That is, we determine, in accordance with our account agreement, which stocks, bonds, and other financial products are needed for your account and take the appropriate action to establish, maintain, and re-balance your portfolio.
• Our goal in managing client accounts is to keep annual trading commissions to less than 0.5% of the clients account size. The trading costs you incur are always fully disclosed to you on your daily, monthly, and yearly account statements provided by our independent Custodian.
• We design and manage investment portfolios so that our clients achieve superior investment results. Achieving superior investment returns with reduced investment risk (so called risk-adjusted-returns) is the essence of Value Added Investment Management.
• Most firms assess the fee in advance, which means your account is debited January1 for the services you’ll receive in January. We at sunrise, assess the fee after the month has ended (Jan 31 in this example). This would allow more of your money to work for you and would add-up considerably over a long period.
• Wealth managers traditionally rebalance portfolios quarterly or annually to control risk due to asset class drifts. We practice something called opportunistic rebalancing, which not only controls portfolio drift, but also provides significant return improvements by capturing buy-low/sell-high opportunities as asset classes sporadically drift relative to each other. These benefits, attributed to transient momentum and mean reversion effects, occur sporadically in time and can only be captured by monitoring portfolios frequently. The rebalancing benefits would be higher compared to trading costs and tax deferrals. We generally follow the following guidelines regarding rebalancing of portfolios:
  • Use wider rebalance bands based on the standard deviation of an asset class rather than a constant band across all assets (which is what most of the advisors do like the +/- 20% drift)
  • Client portfolios are evaluated for allocation drift on a daily basis
  • Only rebalance asset classes that are out of balance—not classes that are in balance
  • Increase the number of uncorrelated classes used in portfolios (diversification).