Elissa Buie
A marriage
led to a merger and ultimately to a place on our list of top emerging RIA
firms. Elissa Buie and David Yeske are each the founders of their own
financial planning firms, hers in Vienna, Va., his in San Francisco. After the two advisors, who met on the
board of the Financial Planning Association, got married five years ago,
they ended up merging their professional as well as their personal lives,
and in 2008 Yeske Buie was born. The firm, which maintains offices on both
coasts, manages about $300 million for some 200 clients, primarily
individuals.
The firm uses
passively managed funds--index funds and exchange-traded funds--because, Buie
asserts, "markets are either efficient or where they may be
inefficient there's no reasonable way to harness that inefficiency."
But Buie
doesn't like being lumped with the buy-and-hold crowd. "We're not
traders by any stretch, but we're very actively doing things," she
says. The firm looks at rebalancing portfolios every two weeks, and the
equity portion, invested half in U.S. stocks, half in international stocks,
is overweighted in small-cap value stocks. "We're not making a
call," says Buie. "We just believe being worldwide is the best
way to have the largest selection of small and value companies in which to
invest."
The firm
lowered its minimum investment requirement in 2009 to $1.5 million to
accommodate new clients whose accounts had lost value along with the
market, and Buie reports a steady influx of new business.
The toughest
part of the merger, she says, has been standardizing the financial planning
side of the business (planning is included in every client's asset
management fee). For example, how do you standardize the logistics of
deciding whether someone should do a Roth IRA conversion? As an industry,
Buie says, "we have a long way to go before we have standard best
practices."
