Individuals

Over the past 20 years, and despite several global economic and financial crises, major asset classes have achieved significant annualized returns.

Over the same period, and despite all the advances in technology enabling greatly increased access to investing information and markets, several research studies indicate that the average individual investor has been unable to realize as much of a benefit from their investing efforts

In our experience there are several reasons for this state of affairs. In general, individual investors:

• Lack skills required to select appropriate investments and manage them over time
  
• Have no plan or are unable to follow one
  
• Make decisions driven by emotions of fear and greed (i.e. “buy high and sell low”)
  

Making their plight worse, good help is hard to find, as noted in a 2015 article by Jason Zweig (emphasis ours):

“I think it’s vital to recognize that people need advice. The problem is we have a supply/demand imbalance. There are a vastly greater number of people who need objective, good, honest, honorable, reasonably priced advice. But the number of people who can provide it, I think, falls well short of the demand.”

“So I genuinely believe that if you can find a financial advisor who’s trustworthy in the true sense of that word—someone who is competent and knowledgeable and whose services are fairly priced and who isn’t rife with conflicts of interest, you’re a very, very lucky investor.“

We at Kastel Capital Advisors work very hard to make sure all of our clients become “very, very lucky investors.”