Client Service November 25, 2020

Advisers Giving Back – Domenic DiPiero at Newport Capital Group

The founder and president of the firm says giving back to the community is something he learned at home—and from an early age.
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Art by Ellen Duda


Like many of the subjects of PLANADVISER’s Advisers Giving Back profile series, Domenic DiPiero, founder and president of Newport Capital Group, a registered adviser firm in Red Bank, New Jersey, speaks proudly about his firm’s history of charitable engagement.

“This is something that has been part of my family life for a long time, well before the foundation of Newport,” he says. “It’s been an enriching personal journey for me, forever really. Today, with Newport’s success, I work to make sure this is part of our culture. I want philanthropy to be a big part of our overall mission. We give an outsized portion relative to a firm our size, frankly. It’s a huge part of our culture and one of the central reasons we are all rowing the boat.”

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DiPiero says this history of engagement has shown him quite a few things, including that you can’t just will people into being enthusiastic about giving back.

“You really do have to make it a core part of your culture to understand that we are not just working together to make ourselves wealthier,” he says. “You have to make sure your people understand we’re here to make the world a better place, too, and I think that takes a certain kind of person to embrace that vision in the workplace.”

DiPiero has lived in Red Bank his whole life, and the lion’s share of his personal giving and Newport’s giving has been focused in the local region. The firm’s website includes a philanthropy page that details an impressive list of deserving entities that have received support, from the Hackensack Meridian Health Foundation, which advances clinical research and education, to the Friendship Train Foundation, a community foundation. Beyond financial resources, many of these organizations benefit from the board participation of Newport’s leadership and staff members, including Drexel University. 

One particularly interesting way DiPiero has found to give back came up about 10 years ago, when he acquired a struggling local Red Bank newspaper, The Two River Times.

“At that time, I wanted to support the paper, but it quickly became apparent that the paper was a great voice for the charitable community,” he explains. “That was the one paper that was covering the fundraising events and the galas that allowed many charities to exist. A big mission of the paper today is to shine a light on the right charities.”

Through the giving Newport has engaged in, the firm and its staff have become experts in evaluating charities, DiPiero says.

“We all live this stuff,” he adds. “We are involved with many local charities in the community, and we’ve also done things like take in kids as interns and then decide to sponsor them for college. We’ve gotten multiple kids into some really great schools and have supported them along the way.”

Thinking about how other advisers can get involved in giving back, DiPiero suggests keeping it local. He has done some national and international giving, but, at the end of the day, he says, the biggest rewards come from changing the immediate world around you in a positive and constructive way.

“I feel strongly, as a New Jersey resident, that I want to make my home a better place,” he says. “You will see that most of the charities we support are between Philadelphia and New York. In this region, and in pretty much any place in the world, you don’t need to look far to find some great organizations that need support.”

DiPiero says the coronavirus pandemic has clearly hurt many deserving causes this year, so charitable organizations need more help than ever.  

“Every charity is struggling right now to some degree,” he says. “Hackensack Meridian Health, for example, is on the front lines fighting this pandemic, and it’s an incredible strain on their staff and resources. Others are impacted by the social distancing requirements, like our local Count Basie Center for the Arts. They cannot put on shows right now and it’s a real strain, nor can the Two River Theater in Red Bank.”

DiPiero’s final pieces of wisdom are to go into any giving engagement with eyes wide open and to do your research in advance.

“I do think it is important to be diligent and to get to know the organizations first,” he suggests. “Get to know their finances and whether you can make a meaningful impact.”

The Markets November 18, 2020

Looking for Investment Standouts in the Current Environment

Asset managers share strategies retirement plan investors should consider to weather the low interest rate and volatile equity environment.
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Art by Gizem Vural


Retirement plan advisers may be wondering where to steer retirement plan investors, given interest rates are at historic lows extreme market volatility has continued since March.

Investment managers, for the most part, say retirement plan participants should continue to focus on the long term and have faith that valuations will increase. However, they do point to certain areas of the stock and fixed income markets that show promise.

As far as remaining faithful in investing is concerned, Rich Weiss, multi-asset strategies chief investment officer (CIO), American Century, says, “If you look at the history of the U.S. financial markets, even at the most frightening times, stocks have eked out 10% or more for most decades, so I am not so concerned about the longer term. At almost any period in history, investors have thought it is difficult to eke out returns in stocks and bonds, and this time is no different.”

That said, Weiss and other asset managers say there are investing and financial planning strategies that retirement plan investors should consider right now.

American Century had been recommending being overweight in growth stocks, such as technology, discretionary stocks and health care, Weiss says. “Two months ago, we, fortunately, took a more neutral position between growth and value and picked up or created an overweight in some of the value-oriented sectors, like REITs [real estate investment trusts]. Looking ahead, we are likely to invest in real estate, financials, cyclical industrials.”

On the fixed income side of the equation, with interest rates staying near zero, and the fear that returns could even be negative, Dan Keady, chief financial planning strategist at TIAA, says, “Investors could move up the ladder of risk, away from high-quality bonds to lower quality bonds to increase the yield. The trade-off, of course, is market volatility. Lower quality bonds trade more like stocks, but some people are willing to take that trade-off.”

Weiss says it also makes sense to diversify the fixed income portion of a portfolio geographically into emerging bond markets. “That way, you get a diversification of monetary policies and foreign exchange diversification, as well,” Weiss says.

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“In addition, in many of our fixed income portfolios, we have ventured out into munis [municipal bonds], even though they may be taxable,” Weiss says. “Normally, they yield less than Treasuries, but, in this atypical environment, they are actually yielding more.”

It is also paramount for participants to have a truly diversified portfolio, Keady says.

Weiss says he likes to quote from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes: “Invest in seven ventures, yes, in eight. You do not know what disaster may come upon the land.”

For those approaching retirement, Matt Sommer, senior managing director of the retirement strategy group at Janus Henderson, says it is important for them to have enough cash on hand to live on for two years so that they could ride out a market downturn.

In line with that, Keady says that in a low-interest rate environment, financial planning becomes even more important. He also says people should delay starting their Social Security benefits past the first year of eligibility, 62, as long as possible, and, ideally, until age 70, because delaying benefits increases them by 8% every year.

In addition to this, he says he believes participants whose employer offers both a Roth and a traditional defined contribution (DC) plan should consider splitting their deferrals among the two in order to diversify their taxes in retirement.

Sommer adds that no matter how challenging the stock market might seem at any given time, dollar-cost-averaging pays off over the long term, and, with many plans, participants can benefit from a company match.

The bottom line, the asset managers say, is that despite the seemingly overwhelming challenges in the stock market earlier this year and the current interest rate environment, there are always bright spots and rewards for those who stay the course.

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