It is the fairest question a successful person can ask, and most of our industry answers it badly — with a performance chart, or with a shrug. Here is the honest version, including the part where the answer is that you should not.
Our clients are doctors, dentists, attorneys and founders. They learned something hard, they were good at it, and they are used to being right. So when they look at a portfolio of publicly available funds and a fee attached to it, the arithmetic looks obvious — and nobody in the industry ever engages with it seriously.
We will engage with it. Because for a meaningful share of what gets sold as advice, the objection is correct.
If all four of these are true, you probably do not need us — and we would rather say so than take a fee for confirming what you already have.
One or two income sources, no business, no concentrated position, no equity compensation, no estate you are trying to route around a tax problem.
Not held in your head. An actual target allocation, actual rules for what you do when it moves, and a date you review it.
Every quarter, in a year you are busy, in a month the market is ugly. Not most of the time. Every time.
Not moved to cash in a drawdown. Not added to something after it ran. Not delayed a rebalance because it felt like the wrong week.
If that is you, a low-cost portfolio you run yourself is a perfectly good answer, and the industry's discomfort with saying so is exactly why nobody trusts it.
The choice of investments is the most visible part of this work and the smallest part of the difference. Three things matter more, and none of them are about being smarter than you.
A decision made calmly, before it is needed, is a different decision from one made in the week it becomes urgent. The value of writing it down is not the document. It is that the hardest choices were made when nothing was at stake.
Allocations drift. Tax law moves. Your income, your family and your timeline change. A portfolio built once and admired thereafter is not a strategy — it is a snapshot of what you believed on the day you built it.
This is the whole thing. You will never be a neutral party to your own money. The point of a professional is not superior conviction — it is a second set of judgment that does not flinch on the day yours does.
Every self-manager we have met can describe the discipline perfectly. The gap is not knowledge. It is that the same person who can explain why you buy when things are ugly is the person who has to actually do it, in a month where the balance is down and the news agrees with the fear.
Written in a calm month, when the logic was obvious and the numbers were abstract.
Because it feels responsible. Because everyone is talking about it. Because it has gone up, which reads as evidence, and the thing that fell reads as a mistake you would be repeating.
This is not a criticism of anyone's intelligence. It is a description of how people behave with their own money, including us — which is precisely why the process, the schedule and the outside judgment exist.
Even a self-manager who does everything above correctly is solving one problem out of four. The other three are where the money actually goes.
Which account a decision happens in, in which year, at which bracket. A well-built portfolio in the wrong location, realised at the wrong time, quietly costs more than the fund choice ever earned.
Turning a balance into a paycheck is a different discipline from growing one. Which accounts you draw from, in what order, and what happens if the first years go badly.
What passes, to whom, in what form, and at what tax cost. And the harder one: what happens to the plan the day the person who ran it is not the one running it.
They are not separate problems. A decision in any one of them changes the answer in the other two — which is why they are built at one table here, by one team that includes a CPA.
This is the argument for the whole structure, not the portfolio. See what that covers →
Cannon Capital has never had an investment product of its own and takes no commissions. That is a structural fact, not a promise — and it is the reason every position can be judged on one question only.
If we cannot explain why something belongs in your plan in plain English, it does not belong in your plan. There is no second reason — no shelf, no lineup, no quota.
We do not start with an allocation and fit your life to it. We start with what the money has to do, and when, and build backwards from that.
Fee-based, disclosed, and identical whether a recommendation is exciting or boring. The only alignment that matters is that our revenue moves with your assets — so when your account falls, so does ours.
Many firms hold an advisory registration and a brokerage licence at once, and run the profitable business through the second one. We hold only the first. The standard applies to everything we do, not to a carve-out of it.
Not rhetorical. If you answer these and the answers are good, keep doing what you are doing.
A complimentary strategy session: your accounts, your tax picture, your plan — and an honest read on whether hiring anyone improves it. You leave with the analysis whether or not you hire us.
Nothing on this page is investment advice or a recommendation, and none of it is a claim about investment results. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Whether professional management is appropriate depends entirely on your own circumstances.