26A
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2016
FLORIDA TODAY
BUSINESS
NEWSMAKERS
MELBOURNE
Shah, Dunwoody join
Florida Tech trustees board
Florida Institute of Technology recently announced that Mahesh “Mike”
R. Shah and Ann Dunwoody were
named to the the university’s Board of
Trustees.
Shah is owner and president of M&R
High Point Holdings Inc., comprised of
wholesale and retail gasoline businesses and other real estate holdings. He is
also president of Southeast Petro Dist.
Inc.
Shah also is a founding member of
the Florida Tech Panthers Football
Founders Club.
Dunwoody is the first female fourstar general in U.S. military history and
a 1988 graduate of Florida Institute of
Technology’s Fort Lee, Virginia, site.
She earned her master’s degree in
logistics management through the Flor-
Dunwoody
Shah
ida Tech off-site program, focusing on
an area that would become a major part
of her military career.
She is credited with leading the
transformation of the Army’s logistics
organizations.
into an exclusive club of national sales
agents.
Anita Campbell, Gloria Yanes and
Michael Adams were invited to join the
President’s Club of AmeriLife, the premier insurance marketing group in
America.
Campbell wrote $283,428 in new
business-annualized premiums last
year; Yanes wrote $230,536 and Adams
wrote $176,024.
AmeriLife & Health Services agents
who write at least $150,000 in annual
premium qualify for President’s Club
membership.
CAPE CANAVERAL
MELBOURNE
Aerodyne’s President Award
goes to Rigolini
Agents with AmeriLife
& Health recognized
A number of life and health insurance agents with AmeriLife & Health
Services of Brevard County were singled out for their success by induction
Aerodyne Industries LLC recently
presented its President’s Award to
Marianne Rigolini at the third annual
Test and Operations Support Contract
awards banquet at the Radisson Resort
Marianne Rigolini
received the
Aerodyne Industries
LLC President’s
Award.
at the Port in January.
Rigolini is the Manager of TOSC’s IT
Applications and Systems Development
Team at the Kennedy Space Center. She
worked closely with numerous customer groups both within and external to
the TOSC team and identified opportunities for the development of the next
IT Systems that enabled the entire
TOSC team to better meet and exceed
customer expectations.
The President’s award, which is
given to an individual who has made
significant contributions to the success
of the company, was presented by Aerodyne CEO Andrew Allen.
To submit an item for Business Newsmakers, contact Wayne T. Price at
321-242-3658 or wprice@
floridatoday.com.
Funds
Continued from Page 25A
WAYNE T. PRICE/FLORIDA TODAY
Eugene Conner, who lives in Heritage Isle in Viera, can’t understand how his bill went from about $40 to nearly $1,000 for one month.
Water
Continued from Page 25A
typical swimming pool holds anywhere from 10,000-13,000 gallons. It’s
especially mind-boggling considering
no one was home at the time.
Running toilet? A faucet left on?
Maybe a leak in a pipe? Not likely,
Conner said. Why would the bill have
returned to normal in October?
How about theft? Could someone
have connected a hose to the spigot
behind his house and then filled up a
water truck? Very possible. He was
told by the Heritage Isle property
owners’ association to get a lock for
the exterior spigots, which he is doing.
Or maybe it was a broken meter?
Also possible. Cocoa said they’d send
someone to check the meter but Conner would have to pay $50 for the service call.
Conner balked.
“Why should I have to pay for
that?” Conner asked. “It’s not my mistake.”
Water has been in the national news
a lot lately, considering what’s happening in Flint, Michigan, where cruddy
water corroded cruddy pipes and
made it into people’s drinking water.
There has been fever pitch of finger
pointing and political football over
what’s happening in Flint and who’s
responsible.
(You just know it’s a hot potato
when Cher gets involved.)
Thank goodness our water issues
here, at least for now, revolve around
billing and not contamination. However, pressures on an overtaxed aquifer
as the population grows in Florida will
no doubt grow in importance in Florida.
Back to Conner.
You can imagine his reaction to a
water bill for $923.90 when he wasn’t
even home. Maybe, just maybe, he’d
understand a leak. But 90,000 gallons
out of the blue for just one month?
“I was shocked, beyond anything I
had ever experienced in my entire
life,” said Conner, who lived near Suntree Country Club prior to moving to
Heritage Isle, in November 2014.
“I had never had an experience like
this,” he said.
The policy with the Cocoa Water
Department is pretty much this: Once
treated water gets recorded through
your meter, it’s your responsibility —
bad pipes, leaky commode or theft.
I attended a Cocoa City Commission
meeting last month when a local businessman addressed council members
on a similar issue. He was billed for
200,000 gallons of water — he only had
one bathroom and a sink in a retail
space he was renting. His bill topped
$3,000 when it had been in the $100
range.
To the city’s credit, officials were
working a negotiated discount on the
bill — maybe in the $600 range — just
as they have attempted with Conner.
For Conner, they dropped his back
payment to $324.34.
In the businessman’s case, he and
the property owner wanted to whittle
the $600 settlement further, maybe to
around $300. Call it good faith negotiating between the city and a customer,
the property owner said.
At that meeting, Jack Walsh, Cocoa’s utility director, cautioned about
going too far down that road. First,
though, losing that amount of water
can be more discrete than you think,
he said.
“Florida is a peninsula, basically
made of sand,” he said. “You can lose
10,000-200,000 gallons of water and not
ever see a puddle.”
On negotiating with individual customers beyond utility policy? Well, it’s
a slippery slope. “The fact of the matter is my treatment plant spent the
money, the time and the effort to deliver the water,” Walsh said. “And whether that water was used for a beneficial
use in the sink, or whether it went
through a broken service and disappeared into the ground, it still
passed the meter and it’s the responsibility of that customer.”
Wish Mr. Conner good luck. I see
water turning to steam if there isn’t a
resolution.
Price is business editor at FLORIDA TODAY. He can be reached at
321-242-3658 or [email protected]. You can also follow him on
Twitter @Fla2Biz.
If you had just owned the U.S. stock
market or international developed-market equities for 20, 30, 40 years, you
would have done fine with a cap-weighted approach.
I think the industry generally doesn’t
like the term, but no one has, as of yet,
come up with another term that has
seized the popular consciousness.
Q: So why do anything other than traditional index funds?
A: With more technology, more data,
more understanding of markets, we can
do more. Some people want something
other than the cap-weighted return.
They want an outcome, like some people
want market exposure but lower risk.
Other people want to outperform the
market.
If your desire is to do one of those two
things, then using a cap-weighted strategy doesn’t meet your goal.
Q: So are investors usually in one
camp or the other? Either vanilla index
ETF or a smart-beta option?
A: More often, what I see now is that
people are blending them. So someone
takes money out of our S&P 500 fund,
IVV, and adds it to LRGF, which is our
multi-factor smart beta fund (it invests
in an index that emphasizes certain
slices of the market, based on quality,
size and other factors). They might split
it 50/50.
Other investors who have less of a
risk appetite, they look at these minimum-volatility strategies. That was a
huge category for us last year, and
$10 billion flowed into those funds
(across the industry).
Those funds are designed to perform
in a way that smooths out the ride so that
when markets go soaring way high, they
get most of that return, but when markets go way low, they capture less of that
downside. These things now have track
records.
Q: Is there a minimum age that a fund
has to be before people are willing to consider it?
A: It’s highly dependent. In general,
after one or three years, you see people
believe more than they did in the beginning. But there are also ways to back-test
it.
Q: So people believe in these low-volatility funds?
A: People are using minimum-volatility funds as their core, as a better way to
do cap-weighting indexing, particularly
if what you anticipate is more volatility.
I’ve watched them leg into it, but
there are many early signs that investors
are holistically replacing their S&P 500
investing with something like USMV because everyone is telling them there is
going to be more volatility.
Q: Is it mostly older investors who are
closer to retirement who are most interested?
A: We’ve seen a really big mix. Millennials, those who were skeptical of stocks
in general, look at these as a better way
of doing indexing, like this is just the
next generation of indexing.
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