Our Team

My name is Eric Nelson, and I founded Servo Wealth Management in 2012 to help individuals and families adopt a more intelligent investment approach so that they would have a better chance of achieving their long-term financial goals.

My career as a financial advisor did not start well—I first worked at the brokerage firm UBS (then known as PaineWebber), calling people out of the phone book to sell them stocks from our approved list so that I could meet my monthly commission quota. I wasn’t very good at convincing people, which in a way was good because the stocks UBS was touting didn’t do very well.

After barely a year, I left to join the investment group of M&T Bank, where I first learned about asset allocation and the failure of traditional actively-managed mutual funds to outperform the market. Every fund I selected had a tremendous historical track record, but it seemed to falter as soon as I started adding them to client portfolios. I learned the hard way about the failure of outperforming managers to continue their winning ways.
Fed up with the commission-based side of the business, I moved to Oklahoma City in 2001 and joined Charles Schwab. I had started to learn about the benefits of investing in index funds instead of actively managed funds, and I liked that Schwab had a family of index funds I could recommend, as well as the fact that they didn’t pay their financial advisors commissions to sell products.

While I was at Schwab, I learned more about asset allocation. I was introduced to “asset class investing” by reading the timeless, classic book from William Bernstein, The Intelligent Asset Allocator. This book was also my first exposure to Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), the investment firm that invented the concept of asset class investing in the early 1980s, and which I still use to manage client portfolios to this day. But it was another discovery I made from reading the book that shaped the second half of my career—in the Appendix, Bernstein had recommended a monthly newsletter, called Asset Class, from a financial advisor in Northern California named Jeff Troutner, for those who wished to learn more about this modern asset class approach to investing. It’s not hyperbole to say that the Asset Class newsletter had a bigger impact on my career and Servo than any other single resource.

In the mid 2000s, while still at Schwab, I started working on my CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) designation, but it was my continued self education, especially reading and rereading each issue of Jeff Troutner’s Asset Class dating back to the early 1990s that had the most significant affect on me—not just in terms of how I looked at investing, but also because I saw for the first time the direction I wanted my career to go. Jeff ran his own independent investment advisory firm, applying the principles and techniques he wrote about in the Asset Class newsletter to help hundreds of his clients achieve their long-term goals. I wanted to do the same thing.

Life sometimes takes strange turns. A few years after completing my CFA designation, and after a brief stop at a local independent investment advisory firm with a very different investment approach, I took the massive leap in 2009 to leave Oklahoma altogether, move out to Northern California, and go to work with Jeff and his firm, which had become Equius Partners after merging with fellow advisor Jeff Jonkneer. I spent three fantastic years in California, working with Jeff and Phil, and his son TJ, who wound up becoming a great friend, all while getting a chance to watch many San Francisco 49ers football games in person—the team that I have been a massive fan of since I was in elementary school, parading around in my Joe Montana uniform.

After a few years in California, however, my family made the difficult decision to move back to Oklahoma. It was one of the most challenging decisions I’ve ever made. Still, it allowed me the opportunity to start my own investment advisory firm in the way that I had dreamed of for over a decade, a leap I never would have been able to make were it not for the tremendous support of my friends and colleagues at Equius, who taught me so much about investing but also managing a business.

I have managed Servo for almost 15 years, trying every day to spread the word of a more straightforward and smarter way to invest your serious, hard-earned savings using the same guidelines and principles that I learned about years ago from Jeff and studying his Asset Class newsletters, and later on working directly with him.

If you’d like to learn more about asset class investing and how I might be able to help you achieve your long-term financial goals, please do not hesitate to schedule an appointment with me to talk further.