I got fooled by his radio show. At the beginning of 2019, I had him manage $2.25 million in what was promised to be a "customized" investment strategy. His fee was slightly above 1%, so I expected good results. In 2019, the S&P returned over 30% and the average LT bond return was over 19%. I got less than 4%! Outside of the initial investments, which BTW took almost 2 weeks, he made fewer than a handful of trades, despite the dismal performance.
I was never contacted in 2019. In Jan 2020, I had to ask for a portfolio review. I told him I was unhappy with the paltry 4% return. He tried to convince me that it wasn't bad for the investment strategy he had me in. I came to find that i was placed in one of his automated customized fund strategies, and no one was actively managing my portfolio. I called him on a Dryfus fund that he had invested a large portion of my portfolio. For the year it had a loss of 6%. His explanation for leaving me in the fund was that the fund manager had been good in the past. I asked him why nearly 20% of my portfolio was in cash. His response was that it was to balance out my risk profile. Why am I paying him over 1% to invest in cash? He reluctantly agreed to liquidate the Dryfus fund and invest the cash, but would require manual transactions outside the investment strategy he had put me in. He committed to change to a less conservative strategy.
Covid began to hit the market hard a few weeks after our meeting. Over a period of 2 weeks, I saw my portfolio drop 1% to 10% per day. But there was no activity in my portfolio. No one was doing anything to stem the losses. I finally had enough and instructed David Hollander to liquidate all of the equity funds. The result was a net loss in principal of over 30%!!!! No apologies. He said he was keeping me in for the bounce back. The markets continued to crash another 15% before bottoming out.
I ended up managing my money myself and despite the horrible experience with David, I generated a 25% return for 2020.
Don't make the mistake that I did. If you are willing to pay over 1% fee, make sure you are getting someone that is actively managing your portfolio, and not a cookie cutter program. read more