Our Fiduciary Difference

ost “advisors” are not fiduciaries and are held to a low legal standard where they must merely consider your interests.  As a fiduciary, we must always do what is in our clients’ best interest. This is the single biggest difference among advisors and most people don’t know the difference exists. It is simple, yet extremely significant!

What makes us unique is that Manchester Financial is an Investment Counsel providing a complete, institutional portfolio over which we exercise continuous supervisory services. Many firms we compete with offer some of the above, but very few provide all three attributes. In fact, all brokerage firms such as Merrill Lynch, Salomon Smith Barney, USB and Wachovia, as well as private money management firms such as Fisher Private Client Group, generally offer a limited number of such attributes and provide even more limited services. However, they market themselves quite differently.

We are set up to assess and control your portfolio to your satisfaction. Most advisors are not allowed to make strategic changes without your approval, yet their clients are unaware. While this is not needed very often, it has been extremely valuable several times in recent years, such as 2000’s tech stock sell-off, 2001’s 9/11, 2002’s Enron/WorldCom debacle and the more recent 2008 market collapse. Each time the market was down 10-20%, most advisors did nothing. Why?  It is generally because they are legally unable to, or find it too difficult to change what they’ve invested or they never set up the necessary systems to even try. Thus, when you need them the most, they can’t perform.