The Value of An Independent Investment Advisor That Can Think Outside The Box

I have developed a relationship with one of the largest teams at one of the largest bond and fixed-income firms (Merrill Lynch) that could benefit my clients.  Unlike with stocks where you can access a market on most public equity securities, buying physical bonds requires finding a willing seller or accessing a large investment bank’s inventory of bonds.

TRC can now offer large investor access to this firm’s extensive research and inventory of bonds.

Not to anyway disparage this firm, but these larger firms tend to generally offer “conventional”, “standard” or “vanilla offerings” so as not to be sued by investors.   Closed-end funds are rarely researched by any of these larger institutions as they deem CEFs generally too risky. 

This creates a significant opportunity for those like me to do the research and “look under the hood” of the CEFs. The goal is to create a diversified portfolio with higher returns than mutual funds or the bonds themselves, while also creating a core “ballast” of AAA Corporates and US Treasury bonds through ETFs.