North Capital Institutional Advisory Services

North Capital Inc. is an investment management company with a singular focus: delivering custom investment solutions to meet your specific needs. We help institutional clients develop and implement investment plans that allow trustees to fulfill their fiduciary duty, balancing the competing priorities that face institutional investors. Whether you are launching a new endowment or retirement plan, or maintaining an existing fund, we have the expertise to create an appropriate structure or review your existing structure, develop a comprehensive investment policy, and implement a cost-effective, diversified investment program to meet your objectives.

The risks facing endowment officers and trustees have never been greater, and neither have the range of investment choices available. Our investment process for tax-exempt investors is underpinned by three enduring principles: broad diversification, a systematic, “open architecture” approach to investment selection, and low costs.

Diversification has been called the only free lunch in investing, because the risk reducing benefit of diversification is a matter of fact, grounded in mathematics and statistics. We consider an expansive view of asset classes and may incorporate alternative strategies such as commodities, foreign currency, real estate, and other forms of non-traditional beta. Beyond asset classes, we diversify exposure of other types, such as asset type, geographic market, fund and manager. But diversification is not just about risk reduction; it’s about capturing opportunity. Investment research conducted over several decades suggests that the vast majority of returns available from investing can be captured through asset allocation. North Capital incorporates this research into our portfolio construction process, maintaining strategic exposure to a broad array of asset classes rather than attempting to pick winners and losers.

Open architecture means more options for investors. We are an independent, fee-only investment advisory firm with no bank or insurance company affiliation. We do not charge and will not accept any brokerage commission, trailer or compensation of any kind for selling a particular fund or product to advisory clients. This independence ensures that our interests are aligned with our clients’; our sole focus is to provide investment solutions that meet your needs, which may include index funds, diversified mutual funds, separately managed accounts, futures, ETFs or other securities. Beyond the freedom to choose from the full array of investment alternatives, We utilize a systematic approach in selecting investments and managers. We search for persistent sources of alpha rather than for managers with a “hot hand,” since today’s top performers often underperform in subsequent years. When we identify an opportunity to add value to a portfolio, we look for alternative ways to implement the idea more cheaply, with more liquidity and less risk. Because we are not locked into a proprietary platform, we can offer a broad array of solutions across products and markets.

Costs are a drag on portfolio returns. Active management fees are often four or more times the cost of index funds or ETFs, yet most active managers perform worse than their benchmark index. So what are investors paying for? We always consider the impact of transaction costs, management fees and other expenses in determining which investments to select. Low-cost, highly-diversified investments such as risk-based mutual funds, Vanguard index funds, and index ETFs and ETNs form the core of our portfolio strategies. If we do not think we can offer value that is significantly greater than the cost of our services, we will advise you accordingly. This is our commitment as a fiduciary.