A long-term, evidence-based approach to growing your money and protecting the life you've built.
We’re here to help you participate in long-term wealth creation while protecting your plan from avoidable risks, unnecessary costs, poor tax management, concentrated bets, and destructive behavior.
We’re long-term investors who rely on planning, evidence, and personalization to guide our advice. We diversify because markets work and the future is uncertain. We use Root Reserves because you deserve to enjoy your life regardless of whether the market is up, down, or in between. We start with purpose because a portfolio only works if it’s built around you—and if you can actually stick with it for the long run.
Root’s investment philosophy is built on pragmatism, humility, and planning that focuses on you. A thoughtfully built portfolio can help you turn the life you’ve dreamed of into reality.
Investing is challenging because the future is unknowable. Markets move for reasons that only look obvious in hindsight: wars, recessions, pandemics, innovation, inflation, interest rates, politics, and countless other forces nobody saw coming. Our job isn’t to pretend we can predict these events with precision. Our job is to bring objectivity, curiosity, and unflinching rigor to your specific situation, combining your goals and circumstances with what we know about how financial markets actually behave.
Every dollar you invest is doing one of two jobs: owning a piece of great companies around the world, or standing by to give you stability and cash when you need it.
The stock market gives you the opportunity to own pieces of great businesses around the world. In exchange, you get the chance at long-term growth as those businesses innovate, generate profits, adapt, and create value. It is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, wealth-creation engines in human history.
Clients often understand the philosophy but want to know what it means in practice. Here is what a Root portfolio looks like, and what it doesn't look like.
Your portfolio will hold thousands of companies across the United States and around the world, through low-cost, broadly diversified index and systematic strategies. On the growth side, that means exposure to large, mid, and small companies across developed and emerging markets. On the reserves side, that means high-quality, short-duration bonds sized to your spending needs. The exact mix depends on your plan.
Stock picking. Tactical bets on sectors, themes, or countries. High-yield bonds in Root Reserves. Last year’s top-performing fund. Actively managed strategies with high fees and unpredictable tax consequences. Any of these approaches can look great for a stretch. But the evidence doesn’t support them as something you can count on, year after year, to fund a retirement.
Your allocation will drift as markets move. We rebalance systematically when it drifts beyond agreed thresholds, not because of headlines or forecasts. If your plan changes, for example, a new income need, a new income source, a liquidity event, or a shift in time horizon, your portfolio may change too. We don’t want noise to drive changes to a portfolio. Noise can look very convincing, but we never want to confuse activity with productivity.
Our investment approach starts with you and your plan. For too long, financial advice has been shaped by conflicts of interest, commissions, opaqueness, products, and predictions. Root was built to operate differently.
We are fiercely independent. We judge every tool we use by one thing: does it help you get the most out of life with your money? However we invest your money, we’re paid the same way.
Purpose, then plan, then product. Your purpose comes first. The plan and philosophy guide the decision. The product is only a tool.
The funds, providers, and platforms we use matter only to the extent that they help us meet your goals and express our philosophy: diversified ownership, appropriate risk, lower costs, tax awareness, disciplined implementation, and behavior that supports the plan.
Markets are unpredictable in the short term, so we focus on what we can control.
We keep costs low. We pay attention to taxes, turnover, trading costs, and implementation. We rebalance systematically. We tax-loss harvest when appropriate. We tax-gain harvest when appropriate and agreed upon. We keep an eye on your allocations and strategies to make sure they’re still doing the job we hired them to do. Our Investment Governance Group asks whether each allocation, fund, provider, and strategy still addresses your needs and expresses Root’s philosophy better than the available alternatives.
Most importantly,we try to give you the objectivity that keeps you from making the mistakes that destroy wealth: chasing performance, ignoring taxes, overpaying, panic selling, and FOMO.
When markets fall, we don’t recommend selling. We might rebalance or look for a tax-loss opportunity. A 20% drawdown isn’t a sign the plan has failed—it’s a recurring part of owning stocks, and we build that expectation into your plan from day one. Our job in those moments is to be a steady voice, not to manufacture needless activity.
Market downturns are not surprises, but they can be surprising. However a downturn comes about, we know that they’re recurring features of long-term investing. We build portfolios with this in mind so you’re not forced to make an emotional decision in the middle of a storm.
We help you build long-term wealth while protecting your plan from avoidable risk, unnecessary costs, poor tax management, concentrated bets, and destructive behavior. We do this through comprehensive planning, a long-term evidence-based approach, and a portfolio built around your actual life, not someone else's.