Our story

The Motivation

With a career spanning almost 30 years managing pension funds, mutual funds, sovereign funds, trading derivatives on the floor of various exchanges, and eventually managing assets for high net worth individuals, our founder became disillusioned with many of the offerings made available to most individual investors and the motives behind offering many of their products.

Our Philosophy

We believe that clients should have direct access to the investment decision makers involved in handling their assets. Decisions makers that are knowledgeable about every investment security held in the portfolio. At AVA, bottom up research is done on every individual security (both stocks and bonds) and the decision maker is working directly with you, the client. We know what is in your portfolio, and more importantly, why.

Bringing it all together.

We have extensive experience in managing assets for institutional clients. Our goal is to incorporate the same level of customized investment experience, to the individual investor. Our experience is not in sales or building big books of business, it's in managing assets for clients. Our purpose is not to push products or generate fees, it's to give individual clients the institutional experience that they deserve. This is done building customized investment portfolios made up of individual securities instead of mutual funds or ETFs. Through this unique approach, we avoid a "fee on top of fee" structure, better understand all of the portfolio components, and better control the tax implications for our clients.

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About our Founder

Steven W. McGinty, CFA

Founder & President

Steven began his investment career almost 30 years ago with Bankers Trust Company in New York managing accounts for high net worth individuals and working with large institutional clients on derivative transactions.

Following his time in New York, he worked as a portfolio manager and securities analyst for Invesco Capital Management in Atlanta, co-managing over $20 billion in assets for large institutions and foundations. While at Invesco, he was a member of the US Large Cap Value team that achieved top quartile returns versus the peer universe.

In addition to his work managing equity securities, he spent 3 years trading equity, fixed income and commodity derivative securities on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

He moved to Nashville in 2007, and spent 3 years working with high net worth clients at an independent firm before founding AVA Wealth Management.

He holds a BA degree from Vanderbilt University and a MBA from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. He also holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

Steven resides in Nashville, TN with his multi-talented wife, Lisa, who when she's not spending time growing start up technology companies, is designing handcrafted jewelry. His spare time is spent hunting, fly fishing, farming his land, and trying to convince his daughter to join him in these pursuits.