For years, Capital One® has been hiring outspoken celebrities like Samuel L. Jackson, Charles Barkley and Spike Lee to ask folks, “What’s in your wallet?” It’s a memorable ad campaign – and probably a successful one, as they run it every year during March Madness. But perhaps a more relevant question these days is, “What’s in your digital wallet?” Do you have the apps in place to manage your wealth, wherever you may roam? Here’s a summary of the apps you’ll find in our own digital wallets here at Hill Investment Group: HIG Wealth Access – A handy overview of your total wealth, including assets and liabilities such as home(s) and debt loads. HIG Client Portal – A place to check your financial portfolio, as well as to securely store critical electronic documents. HIG’s client portal includes accounts we manage as well as those held elsewhere (such as in a client’s company retirement plan). Custodian Login – Custodian account logins (for us, that’s Schwab), so you can deposit checks, initiate other financial transactions, and review account information. Banking/Credit Cards – Bank and credit card account logins, so you can keep an eye on your spending and saving activities. One of our goals is to enable all clients to Take the Long View® by having easy access to their information. Please reach out to us if we can answer additional questions about what’s in your digital wallet or we can point you in the right direction for your set-up.

There are a myriad of financial talking heads crowding the airwaves with baseless predictions. How do we find the few worth heeding? We look for intellectual curiosity – a thirst for understanding what is right and true, regardless of where it may lead. Inside of Hill Investment Group, we savor the voices who stand out in this way. We point you, our tribe who are committed to Take the Long View®, to AQR Capital Management’s new podcast channel “The Curious Investor.” We are especially impressed by its third episode, “Active versus Passive,” featuring a conversation between Vanguard founder John “Jack” Bogle and AQR managing and founding principal Cliff Asness. As the father of the world’s first publicly available index fund, Bogle personifies passive investing like nobody else can. In contrast, Asness has structured AQR on the premise that he and his team can add value to investors’ portfolios by identifying opportunities to apply evidence-based methodology. He’s our modern “active” aficionado, as we’ve described in earlier posts. You’d think the podcast would be a vigorous debate between these two legends. Instead, it exemplifies the considerable common ground and respect they share. Bogle explains:

“We do things very differently from an investment standpoint – to which I would say: So what? … [W]hat I’ve always admired about Cliff is his intellectual soundness. … I’ve always admired that in anybody. And it doesn’t matter whether their intellectual ideas align with my own or not.”

See what I mean? Especially when it comes to the science of investing, nobody has everything figured out. Even if we did, markets evolve over time, generating new insights, possibilities and questions – new subjects to debate. That’s one of the reasons I love what we do. PS: Here’s the iTunes Podcast channel link, if you’d like to “App it.”

Guided by a board of financial academics and a mission to advance the science of investing, Dimensional Fund Advisors might seem like a surprising source for an article promoting the Tao principle of “wei wu-wei,” or a way to “do without doing.”

But it’s not so surprising, once you appreciate how challenging it can be to Take the Long View® approach to patient, persistent investing – instead of continuously indulging in hyperactive bursts of trading activity.

Vice President Jim Parker of DFA Australia explains the difference in his recent article, “The Tao of Wealth Management.”

At Hill Investment Group, we share Dimensional’s perspective, advising our clients on how to build and preserve personal wealth through a “less is more” approach to their investing. Instead of spinning our wheels chasing today’s crisis or predicting tomorrow’s hot trend, we dedicate our energy to substantively improving our clients’ personal and financial well-being.

In short, while it may seem as if our course is a quiet one, we work hard every day to help our clients achieve wei wu-wei.