How We Manage Money
Our investment strategy is simple but powerful: We aim to capture most of the market's good times and miss most of its bad times. We believe that missing severe market drops is essential to investment success, because the less investors lose during downturns, the less they have to make up before their gains become true gains during a rebound. Making money is important, but protecting that money can be just as important.
Our unique, active management strategy sets us apart from many investment managers who employ buy-and-hold methodologies. We don't pretend to predict the market - that would be foolish. Rather, our proprietary process is based on science and discipline. Our data-driven model recommends investment changes based on market conditions, and our money managers make changes to the Stadion portfolios and funds based solely on these indicators.
The Rules We Invest By
1. Invest when we have an edge. Stadion uses a combination of technical indicators to measure the "weight of the evidence" for the current market environment. These indicators comprise price and breadth data to identify trends in the market and include:
- Advance/decline measures
- New highs/new lows
- Medium- and long-term price trends
- Relative strength among asset classes
2. Invest in leaders. Our proprietary system ranks available investment options using objective, price-based data to identify the top intermediate-term performers. When our model tells us to invest, we invest in these recommendations.
3. Sell when our model tells us to. When our holdings hit their sell criteria, we sell them and move to a defensive position. This step differentiates us the most from many other investment managers.
Winning Results
Obviously, no investment strategy can allocate assets perfectly every time. It's possible to over- or under-emphasize the wrong investment. The intent of Stadion's risk-averse approach aims to deliver satisfying results with a far more comfortable ride than traditional buy-and-hold strategies, accepting the possibility that Stadion may miss some upswings in order to avoid downside risk. Our investors benefit from our use of large money market positions to reduce downside volatility. And because we rigorously follow our model, investors know what to expect from us. After all, pacing and discipline is what's needed to win any long distance race, and long-term investing is no different.
There are additional costs and potential risks associated with investing in domestic and international Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs). Investment in the funds is subject to investment risks, including, without limitation, market risk, management style risk, risks related to "fund of funds" structure, sector risk, fixed income risk, tracking risk, risks related to ETF net asset value and market price, foreign securities risk, risks related to portfolio turnover and small capitalization companies risk. Since each Stadion Fund is a "fund of funds," an investor will indirectly bear fees and expenses charged by the underlying ETFs and investment companies in which a Stadion fund invests in addition to a Stadion Fund's direct fees and expenses. More information about these risks and other risks can be found in the Funds' prospectus.
