About Meritage
Locally grounded. Nationally competitive.Two of those original partners, Mark Eveans and James Klein, remain at the helm, leading a dedicated team of investment professionals, serving both institutional and private clients. Many of our existing clients have been with us since our inception, now including second generation family members.
Right Size
We have grown steadily over our 28 years. Fifteen associates including seven Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA), two Certified Financial Planners (CFP), and two Certified Public Accountants (CPA) oversee approximately 350 relationships and $1.9 billion in assets under management.
Midwest Home
Far from the hectic environment of Wall Street, Meritage is headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas. While most of our clients are regional to Kansas City, relocations and referrals have led to client relationships in 33 different states. Our coastal clients often tell us they enjoy working with a firm with Midwestern values.
Client Services
As our private client business expanded, we added resources to provide the breadth of advisory services that individuals and families expect. Our clients value this integrated approach that brings together a full understanding of how their investments fit with their overall wealth circumstances and long-term goals.
Investment Strategies
From our roots as a value equity manager, we added a growth equity strategy in 1998 and a high-dividend equity strategy in 2003, in addition to our work with taxable and tax-exempt bonds. The mix of the three equity strategies provides each of our clients with broad diversification across equity styles, company size, company geography, and equity income.
Our Beliefs
Over the years, we developed a set of beliefs that drives everything we do in managing portfolios and in taking care of our clients. We’re pleased to share those with you.
Learn more about our beliefs
- Be fully aligned with our clients by how we invest our own personal assets.
- A highly focused, boutique-sized firm, absent layers of management and bureaucratic mindsets, provides the ideal culture to make investment decisions and retain skilled investment professionals.
- Stock prices are more volatile than a company’s true valuation, primarily because the behavior of investors is not always rational.
- Successful investing is more complex than identifying good companies; it is the insight to know when a stock is attractively priced.
- Value and Growth equity strategies will often perform differently over an investment cycle, but provide similar returns in the long-run. Inclusion of both strategies in a portfolio will provide a smoother pattern of investment returns.
- The odds of success are greatly enhanced by the consistency of a repeatable decision-making process. There are too many smart investors in this business for a single decision maker to always be smarter than everyone else.
- Reversion to the mean is a powerful force of nature, as well as for stock prices, but the timing of these shifts is impossible to know. Stocks can stay undervalued and overvalued far longer than can be logically explained.
- The primary determinant of stock risk has less to do with the quality of the company, and more to do with what you pay for the stock.
- It is easy to become over-diversified by owning a portfolio of mutual funds and ETFs, resulting in index-like performance with active-manager fees.
- Fair and transparent fees are critical for successful long-term accumulation of wealth.
- “There are no old geniuses on Wall Street.” The more experience and knowledge you have, the more respect you have for what you don’t know.