Sample Investment Report

A bear market’s no fun for anyone, but it can be especially stressful for those with the responsibility of reporting on their church’s investments. We’ve created a sample report to try and make it easier. It includes return numbers from our flagship Diversified Moderate Portfolio. Please adapt it for your context and use it however is most helpful.

The church’s long term investments continue to be held in a diversified portfolio, which our committee believes is the most responsible choice given our goals. As you know, the market has dropped in value in response to COVID-19. The value of our investments has declined, but because of our portfolio’s diversification, including fixed income instruments and some money market assets, it hasn't dropped as much as the equity funds we’ve all seen on the news. As of March 31, our year-to-date returns were -15.99%. (Note to finance chairs: this return data is for the Diversified Moderate Portfolio. If your church’s investments are in a different portfolio, please check your March statements for return data.)

Our investment partners, the Faith Foundation and Wespath Institutional Investments, have reached out to let us know that they have been closely monitoring our investments and have confidence in our portfolio’s long-term viability. In fact, this type of market offers our managers opportunities to purchase excellent companies at discount prices. Because of its diversification, we expect our portfolio to do well compared to its benchmark.

The prudent thing to do, as long-term investors, is to stick with our strategy of riding out the highs and lows of the market. The Dow's had three other sell-offs like this since 1980, and each time the market's taken 2-4 years to recover:

We should be prepared for it to take several years, rather than months, for the value of our church’s investments to rebound. If possible, we should leave the money alone during that period so that we don’t lose its value permanently. As long as we’ve got equity exposure, we’ll see declines during market sell-offs, no matter what manager we use. I remain confident in the management provided by the Foundation and Wespath.

This is a sober report to give and I imagine it’s also sobering to receive. Thank you for your patience, and your understanding of the ups and downs of being long-term investors.