David Berkowitz Email & Phone Number

SInce 2002, I have been a Hedge Fund Manager, an Investment Advisor, and a Portfolio Manager at the firm I founded, ValueAligned Partners. In the previous 20 years, I was an Equity Hedge Fund Trader and Research Analyst at Woodward and Associates and a Corporate Finance and Value-based Management Consultant at Stern Stewart, The EVA Company. Those experiences led me to my primary role today as my clients' investment manager, providing rising income and meaningful legacies.Principles:Owning businesses or shares of those businesses has historically been the simplest, most efficient, and least expensive method of building both rising income and wealth over time.We are long-term, goal-focused, plan-driven stock investors. The key to lifetime success in investing is to act continuously on a specific, written plan. Likewise, we believe substandard returns and even investment failure proceed inevitably from reacting to (let alone trying to anticipate) current economic/market events.My experience has convinced me that the economy cannot be consistently forecast, nor the markets consistently timed. Therefore, the only reliable way to capture the total long-term return of shares of the best businesses is to ride out their frequent but historically always temporary declines.In the last four decades, the average annual price decline from a peak to a trough in the S&P 500 exceeded 14%. One year in five, the decline averaged at least twice that. And on two occasions (in 2000-02 and 2007-09), the Index has actually gone down by -50%. Yet the S&P 500 came into 1980 at 106 and went out of 2022 at 3,839; over those 43 years, its average annual compound rate of total return (with dividends reinvested) was more than 12%.These data underscore my conviction that the essential challenge to long-term successful stock investing is neither intellectual nor financial but temperamental: it is how one reacts to market declines or chooses not to react.These principles will continue to govern the essentially behavioral nature of my advice.