Yon-Drake & Associates, Inc.

Yon-Drake & Associates, Inc. is an investment service in Columbia, SC. The firm is an independent, fee-only investment consulting practice serving institutional funds, including depreciation funds, foundations, endowments, pension funds, defined contribution funds such as 401k and 403b plans, debt reserve funds, and self-insurance funds. Yon-Drake has been in the institutional investment consulting business for 42 years, and its work is built around fiduciary service to institutional investors.

The firm's services center on designing, executing and monitoring a prudent investment program. These include auditing and compliance, investment policy design and development, investment manager searches, portfolio transitions and implementations, performance measurement, and ongoing program maintenance with recommendations for improvement. Yon-Drake's process begins with a thorough understanding of the type of portfolio and its legal status, since most funds carry internal or external constraints on their investments and related policies. Objectives, risk and return expectations, liabilities, time horizon, income requirements and liquidity needs are all weighed, along with risk budgeting and assessment that allows a client to allocate between beta and alpha components of the portfolio. The firm assists with establishing objectives, asset mixes, risk policies, manager policies and benchmarks, and codifying them in a written policy document. Manager searches follow from that policy, and performance measurement and program maintenance keep the program on track and provide the rationale for any changes.

Yon-Drake & Associates is located on Richland Street in Columbia, a short distance from the Governor's Mansion and the Matthew J. Perry, Jr. Courthouse, both about a tenth of a mile away. The Caldwell-Hampton-Boylston House, Columbia Historic District I, and Arsenal Hill Park Center are also within roughly a tenth of a mile, as is the Site of Palmetto Iron Works.

For more than four decades, Yon-Drake & Associates has applied that disciplined consulting approach to the fiduciary needs of institutional investors in Columbia and beyond.