Expert Advice

Why I Joined Rebalance

Financial luminary Charley Ellis on why he decided to join the prestigious Investment Committee at Rebalance.

Charley Ellis: There are two reasons for joining the board at Rebalance. One was anger and one was love. The anger part is, it really bothers me that normal, everyday investors, real people, the people that I meet all the time, need to have access to a low-cost, sensible program that will solve a problem that they know they’ve got but they just don’t have time to solve it themselves. They’d like some safe, sensible way to get pretty damn good investment advice and capability on a systematic and regular basis. Somebody watching out.

When you’re leaving the house and your children are going to be there, the kids are probably going to be fine. But still nice to know that you’ve got a sitter taking care of the kids to be sure it stays fine. If you have a burglar alarm you may do, as we do at our home, turn on the burglar alarm at night. Do we expect anything? Certainly not. It is a good idea to do it anyway? Yes, it is. Because knowing that it’s going to work out fine is really, really helpful. Plain, straightforward investing, not exactly simplistic investing but plain straightforward investing, is the key to success long term in investing for almost all of us.

And here’s an opportunity — the love part  is — here’s an opportunity to work with two of the people I have learned over many, many years to admire most in the investment field: Jay Vivian, who was the investment manager for IBM’s very large retirement security system and Burt Malkiel, who is probably Princeton’s favorite professor and has written one of the most wonderfully popular books on investing and is a man that I’ve known for a long, long time. And he’s fun to work with, bright as could be and very, very effective.