Leading Industry Wide Change, Natixis and John Hailer Guide Clients to Better Portfolio Outcomes.

Building a reputable portfolio is all about accounting for resilience, focusing on diversification, and spreading out your risk into a number of key facets. John Hailer, former leader of Natixis, helped to engineer real growth and change within the sphere of investment portfolio construction. Through his efforts at Natixis, Hailer would help to spearhead a project that would lead to industry-wide adoption and fundamental change within the sphere.

Now the Chairman of the Diffractive Managers Group at 1251 Capital Group, Hailer is taking time out of his day to describe some of the methods and techniques that have led him to such success.

Building a Solid Portfolio the RIGHT Way

From the dot com crash to the housing crisis, there has been seemingly an endless wave of financial frustrations for investors over the past several decades. Despite these hurdles, John Hailer is confident that, with the right process, anyone can succeed.

Focusing on the long-term growth of a portfolio is of the utmost importance, according to Hailer, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to do. Hailer says, “You can’t time the market and you can’t sit out a downturn.”

Hailer points out that the vast majority of the ten best days in the market will occur during a bear market. Avoiding bear markets is commonly a consideration, though missing those ten best days would fundamentally cut your overall returns directly in half.

Hailer goes on to say, “It’s our job as an industry to help them make the right decisions today in order to make sure they and their families have the security they need later in life.”

In order to find long-term success, Hailer advocates for proper portfolio diversification. When properly diversified, portfolios tend to show more resilience – something that could have changed lives during the crash of the early aughts.

Hailer notes, “The goal is to get some good solid returns but do it in a way you are not risking your livelihood, you’re not risking all the things that are important to you.”

Developing a Research Center

While with Natixis, John Hailer would make a name for himself by suggesting the development of the Durable Portfolio Construction Research Center. Offering free consultation services to clients in a product-agnostic environment, the Durable Portfolio Construction Research Center would prove pivotal in helping to gear up investors for the work ahead of them.

Despite the success of the project and its clear impact over the years, Hailer still admits that he received some flack in his heyday. Hailer stated, “I took some grief over it because companies need to run on financials. The idea that we were going to give away a free service (…) was controversial.”

Despite the skepticism surrounding Hailer’s work with the DPCRC, the results of its impact were impossible to ignore. Natixis watched as its market results grew from $130 billion in assets to nearly $900 million in assets under Hailer’s management.

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