Morningstar - Q3 2024 - 62

Investors
Eye on the Horizon
Taking a long-term approach, Peter Disch
pilots his clients through choppy waters.
Emelia Fredlick
USER PROFILE
Peter Disch Jr. started his RIA practice in April
2008. It may not have been the ideal time
to launch, but it pushed him to refine his approach
to helping clients navigate market volatility.
Disch, the founder of Great Point Wealth Advisors
in Boston, still recalls the dread he felt as
he made the trades that rebalanced clients out of
fixed-income allocations and into the tumbling
equity market. But he knew that as hard as it was
for him, it was even harder for the clients.
" Did it make it any easier to do? No, " he says.
" But we know how it worked out. And we should
have known that it was going to work out. "
Disch was 28 at the time, and he drew on his
education for this long-term perspective. Now 44,
he values the wisdom gained in 2008 and the
covid-19 market downturn-but he also recognizes
the value of offering clients a forward-looking
perspective. To that end, he's developed a fund
for clients who want to explore alternative
investments. And one of the core tenets of Great
Point is the embrace of technology that simplifies
clients' lives and the firm's own operations.
" Every aspect of technology that we need to
use, I am 100% on board with investing in, " he
says. " The efficiencies that it builds and
the scalability that it enables are always worth
the investment. "
An Entrepreneurial Spirit
Disch has had a passion for investing since
childhood, when his grandfather explained how
62
Morningstar Q3 2024
investment income funded his life in retirement.
Disch's fascination continued during his studies at
Boston College's Carroll School of Management,
where he was taken with the concept of
compound interest and the puzzle of fitting asset
classes together.
After graduating in 2002, Disch worked for
a national investment firm, but he always had an
entrepreneurial spirit and knew he wanted
to run his own business. He figured that would
mean eventually assuming responsibilities at his
father's car dealership in Connecticut, but
his father encouraged him to give running his
own financial advice firm a shot.
Disch recalls his father recognizing that an RIA
practice might be a better fit for him than a
retail operation. " You have much more flexibility
over your time, and you're not tied to a
location, " he says. He started with a core group
of 40 to 50 clients who followed him to his
newly established RIA from his previous firm.
As videoconferencing has made it easier to work
with clients across the country, Great Point's client
base has expanded to 300 clients across nearly
20 states. There is no asset minimum, and the staff
pride themselves on serving clients of all ages.
" Whether you're in your 30s or in your 70s, we can
help you. And we're going to be around. "
From the Basics to the Complex
Clients who come to Great Point usually aren't
starting from scratch. They tend to have
some investments already-they just need help
making sense of them and making sure
they're being used properly. Disch takes care
to distinguish between a financial plan
and an investment portfolio. " An investment
portfolio without a financial plan is very difficult
to navigate, " he says.
Disch takes a self-proclaimed " very, very simple
approach " to asset allocation. He designates
a " safe " bucket and a growth bucket and allocates
according to investing time frame. He prioritizes
keeping clients aware of the sums in their safe
buckets, so even when the inevitable market
corrections do happen, they can take comfort that
they have safe money to meet expenses.
That enables them to take on the investment risk
necessary to meet their goals.
For the growth bucket, Great Point uses exchangetraded
fund models for the bulk of a client's
portfolio. The firm focuses exclusively on ETFs over
mutual funds, which Disch credits to their price,
transparency, and level of customization.
Says Disch, " For the equity market, we're usually
pretty well-diversified, covering most of the
global equities, and we assign some tilts based on
profitability and value. But within fixed income,
I can buy anything that I want, anywhere
on the yield curve, anywhere in credit quality,
[taking into account the] time frame I have on
that sleeve of money. "
For more-sophisticated clients, Disch recently
launched a hedge fund, Race Rock Multi-Strategy
Fund LP. It allows accredited investors to allocate
money to multiple alternative investments-
including cryptocurrency, real estate, and private
equity-without needing to muster up $1 million
for each one. The fund will be limited to
between 5% and 20% of clients' overall portfolio.
" If you have an appetite to do something a little
different with your money, and you feel like
you can afford to take that risk, then that's what
Race Rock is able to accommodate, " he says.
Disch manages a portion of the money himself
and allocates the rest to specialized portfolio
managers that offer broad diversification within
their space-for example, real estate that
includes warehouses, cold storage, farmland, and
more. Though the fund offers quarterly liquidity,
Disch stresses that clients who invest in it should
abide by the same principles that guide their
Morningstar - Q3 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Morningstar - Q3 2024
