In the Investment World, the Only Constant is Change

You’ve heard the old adage that change is inevitable. But what about the pace of change? It seems like we’re living in a completely different world than the one we remember from childhood, and whether it’s technology or culture, it seems like change has accelerated more and more.

That’s an environment that can make investors nervous, and Rob DeHollander, of the Greenville wealth management firm DeHollander Financial Group, has noticed. As he and his firm help people with asset management, financial planning, retirement planning and more, DeHollander always has his eye on change.

“One of the things that I’ve increasingly been thinking about lately is the acceleration of change. If you think about it, our lives are remarkably different from our grandparents’ lives. I remember growing up with dirt roads and no technology infrastructure. So the amount of change that our generation has been through, it’s kind of hard to overstate that.”

DeHollander cites streaming services as an example of how rapidly change can come to the marketplace and to the culture in general.

“Some of these streaming services toppled movie houses that were in business for a hundred years,” he says. “And it was because old companies were locked into an old business model and were protecting their business mode. Whereas the new companies imagined a new way to do things and were able to execute on it.”

That’s a pattern DeHollander sees in other burgeoning industries right now.

“I’m a former engineer,” he says, “so my mind tends to look at problem solving and look at patterns, and I see some emerging trends coming out. A lot of it’s in the technology space, a lot of it’s in health care, a lot of it’s in medicine, and there are companies that operate in these spaces that are taking advantage of these changes.”

DeHollander says the key to investing successfully right now is guiding clients through those opportunities, even if they’re reluctant to embrace change.

“We tell clients that this change is legit,” he says. “That the pace of change is accelerating, and if you can embrace it, you’re less likely to make bad decisions as a result of the anxiety and stress that we’re dealing with. So we tell clients to focus on the opportunities, not just the change, and there are tremendous opportunities right now.”

He adds that it’s simply his firm’s job to make sure clients are prepared as best as they can be for the future.

“Frankly, that’s what they pay us for,” he says. “We filter information for a living, and so we’re exposed to a wide, wide variety of information. It’s cultural, it’s political, it’s economic; we look at all those things and try to formulate where we think the best place is to invest capital today so that it has the best chance of succeeding in the future. We explain that to clients in a thoughtful manner, they usually get it and there’s usually a commitment to try at least a part of their portfolio in those areas where it looks like there’s greater opportunity going forward.”

“As an investor,” he adds, “you want to invest looking through the windshield, not looking in the rearview mirror.”