Mindful Advisory, LLC is a financial advisory and planning firm dedicated to helping educators, mental health professionals, and thinkers
Mindful Advisory, LLC is a financial advisory and planning firm dedicated to helping wealthy families and individuals with retirement planning and other financial goals. The firm’s clients typically want a basic financial plan, and someone to handle their long-term investing. Also, they frequently enjoy learning about market history and have an affinity for behavioral finance, the study of psychological pitfalls that can make us prone to economic and investing blunders.
John Coumarianos, Mindful Advisory’s founder, has more than twenty-five years of experience as an advisor, analyst, and writer about financial markets and investor behavior. His experience includes stints at Fidelity investments, a mutual fund and equity analyst at Morningstar, director of investments at a family office in California, and a freelance writer contributing more than 30 articles to the Wall Street Journal’s Funds and ETFs monthly section.
Besides helping clients save for retirement, and then distribute their assets to themselves during retirement, John’s is sensitive to the behavioral aspects of saving and distributing assets. Before behavioral economics was a formal discipline, Warren Buffett’s teacher, Benjamin Graham, explained one of the psychologically difficult aspects of investing — the stock market is like a manic-depressive person, eager to pay an unreasonably high price for securities at times and sell them for an unreasonably low price at other times. Recognizing those manic or depressive episodes can be difficult because we’re social beings and take our emotional cues from markets and other people. That’s how market manias and depressive episodes occur in the first place.
An advisor can help clients recognize their emotions and stick with a pre-arranged asset allocation that is rebalanced against market action — buying stocks gently during downturns and selling stocks gently during rallies to maintain the allocation — instead of following market action, or buying high and selling low.