The following is the true story of a couple of hard-working professionals I met in early February this year. They were in their mid-50s and had approximately $20 million in investment assets. We were introduced to them by their business manager. He liked our investment style—we have been advising another client of his for the past decade—which we have dubbed "comfort investing." It's the financial equivalent of comfort food in inclement weather. Like comfort food, our comfort investing strategy is characterized by authenticity.

At most firms these days, the biggest teams are comprised of brokers with titles such as "wealth advisor" whose main role is to outsource the actual investment decision-making to others, either internally or externally. By letting someone else focus on the investments, the advisors are freed up to be wealth aggregators, going after new clients constantly. Over the past decade, this outsourcing model has been the dominant trend in the brokerage business, with the newly minted wealth advisor acting as a middleman between the client and the third-party investment managers.

For many advisors and clients, this model works just fine. But, for this particular couple, they viewed our role as money managers as the key differentiating factor. In keeping with our culinary analogy, we are the cooks in the kitchen.

One spouse in this couple grew up with a father who was not a professional investor, yet he worked closely with a money manager to pick the stocks and bonds in his portfolio. Recalling her father's successful relationship, our client decided she was done dealing with salespeople, and wanted to work directly with the investment decision-makers.

Our core competencies as investors shone through in February when we first met this particular client. The main issue at hand was that this couple, which had retirement in sight, was virtually 100% in risky assets such as stocks and alternative investments. They shouldn't have been, but they were. And as a result, they lost nearly half of their liquid net worth in 2008.

They decided to fire their then-current advisors and hire us, but then the question arose as to when to liquidate the stocks and alternative investments. At that time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was in the mid-7000 range. The inclination of my business partner, Dennis Paul, was to have them sell sooner rather than later. However, my experience led me to recommend holding, as I anticipated a market rally upon Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's announcement of a new bank plan. The couple decided to listen to me and wait. As the next week went by, the rally occurred, and the following Friday with the Dow several hundred points higher, I saw a window of opportunity to liquidate. Our client was entirely in cash over the next two weeks as the market made fresh lows.

Aside from authenticity, a key component of comfort investing is simplicity. On our team we have core competencies as investors for our clients. So when we speak to clients about their stock and bond exposure, we are speaking from first-hand knowledge, not relying on direction from others. We do not overcomplicate the investment process. For this couple, for example, it didn't take us long to figure out that their asset allocation had been horribly wrong.

We reviewed their tax returns and their expense budget and were able to carve out a chunk of money to be invested exclusively in the highest-quality municipal bonds, which would be able to cover 100% of their spendable income requirements (i.e., they could retire today). We then allocated a portion to equities, to be managed in the Large Cap Core equity style that I have been running for more than two decades. But unlike a third party manager or fund, we did not fully invest their equities overnight. Rather we began taking a methodical approach towards constructing a portfolio.

Another key differentiator is trust. The wife in the couple also had a 90-year-old mother with financial issues that needed to be addressed. And, when I looked at the legacy assets of the elderly woman, it was clear that they had not been managed for many years. We cleaned up this portfolio in the same way we had for the client's main accounts, and set up a core taxable bond portfolio appropriate to meet the mother's retirement income needs. I also recognized the tax benefits of the credit shelter trust of the client's late father, and took advantage of them to liquidate all of the legacy stock positions and build out a balanced portfolio for the family. My business partner and I have a long history of successful relationships with clients' business managers.