Finance

Diversity – Alternative Investments Keep Portfolio Profitable

He wasn’t working as a financial advisor when the Great Recession, spanning 2007 to 2009, hit the nation’s economy together with an abrupt burst of the housing bubble and historic crash of the stock market. Instead, he was running a then successful and profitable construction company which, like so many others, felt the extreme economic shockwaves of that time period. As a business owner, he gained first-hand – perhaps unwelcome – experience with efficient and non-efficient methods of dealing with an economy and financial market that was clearly drowning, with no life preservers in sight.

What Kal von Gal, CEO of Vulcan Investments, LLC, based in Birmingham, Ala., also had was his personal interest in investing, which he honed to a fine edge during that period.

“I started this firm from my own personal experience as a private investor. I like economics in general, and realized that my own experience of having gone through the time period now called the Great Recession could help others,” von Gal said. “I saw how that impacted many other individuals – especially those just headed to retirement – losing their entire life savings because they were not positioned correctly in the market. Based on my investments, I knew I could help people do a better job if I began giving them investment advice as a professional investment advisor representative.”

Founding Vulcan in 2010, von Gal hasn’t looked back since, except to keep his memories and lessons learned from the Great Recession fresh in his mind.

His firm has no strict asset requirement that potential clients must meet. Rather, von Gal’s criterion has much more to do with mindset than with current numbers.

“We look for clients who desire to think outside the box when it comes to investing. We want to work with people interested in finding investment opportunities that would not normally be found in the headlines of the financial newspapers,” von Gal emphasized.

International real estate is one of the “alternative” investments, von Gal references, and the firm’s website has a landing page dedicated to explaining Vulcan’s approach. Individual investors may join the firm’s collective overseas real estate portfolio, gaining financial strength in numbers, allowing the firm’s real estate specialists to handle the ins and outs of managing foreign properties.

Another example of von Gal’s different take on investing comes at a time when lower oil prices are giving some investors significant pause regarding the future of the oil and gas industry in the United States.

Not von Gal. In a commentary posted shortly after Thanksgiving 2014, he encouraged investors to consider including oil and natural gas companies in their portfolios: “The rapid selloff in the oil sector is creating a once-in-a-decade buying opportunity for many consistently profitable and well-run companies that wouldn’t otherwise be trading at such discounts to future earnings,” vonGal wrote.

Learn more about Vulcan Investments, LLC, online at www.vulcaninvestments.com


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