The Oxford Pillar: How Three Decades of Independent Thought Built a Different Kind of Advisor
There is no shortage of investment research. If you’re an Oxford Club member, you already know this. The newsletters come in, the ideas are compelling, and the analysis is some of the best independent research published anywhere. The problem some Oxford Club investors face isn’t finding quality research or recommendations. It’s knowing what to do with it, and how to apply it to their portfolio, and understanding risk management.
That gap between insight and execution is exactly where I have spent the last 30 years.
My name is Ron McCoy. I am the founder of Freedom Capital Advisors, and I have been one of the Oxford Club’s Pillar One Advisors since the program’s earliest days. What began as a professional introduction became the philosophical foundation of how I build portfolios.
The Introduction That Started Everything
In the late 1990s, a colleague of mine named Karim Rahemtulla, who was serving as the Oxford Club’s Investment Director at the time, introduced me to the organization. That introduction didn’t just add a research source to my reading list. It gave me something harder to find: a philosophical home.
I became one of the very first Pillar One Advisors. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate how significant that would be. Looking back, it’s difficult to overstate the influence that relationship has had on how I think about markets, risk, and the responsibility of managing other people’s money.
Why Independent Research Is Non-Negotiable
Most investment research on Wall Street isn’t truly independent. It passes through filters: proprietary products, distribution incentives, and pressure to stay close to the benchmark. The result is what I call “closet indexing,” advisors charging active management fees while quietly tracking the index and hoping no one notices.
The Oxford Club was built on a different premise. Their commitment to unbiased, unconflicted research was, and still is, rare. As a fee-only fiduciary advisor, that philosophy matched exactly how I was already trying to operate. I don’t sell products. I don’t earn commissions. My only obligation is to get it right for the client.
Over the years, I’ve watched the Club grow into one of the world’s most respected independent investment publishers. That growth confirmed what I believed from the beginning: when you remove the conflicts, the quality of thinking improves. And better thinking leads to better portfolios.
Four Thinkers Who Shaped My Approach
One of the things I’ve always valued about the Oxford Club is that it isn’t a single strategy. It’s a collection of serious thinkers, each with a distinct lens. Four have had an outsized influence on how I build portfolios today.
Alex Green has a mind that consistently runs ahead of the crowd. His ability to translate complex market dynamics into a clear, actionable perspective is a skill most analysts don’t have, and his long-term optimism is grounded in evidence, not wishful thinking. His work reinforced my conviction that investing is ultimately about probability and time horizon, not short-term prediction.
Marc Lichtenfeld is, in the best possible sense, a numbers man. His work with the Oxford Income Letter, and his discipline around dividend growth and technical overlays, have directly shaped the income strategies I use for clients who need reliable cash flow without sacrificing long-term growth. When a client asks me how to make their money last, Marc’s framework is part of the answer.
Karim Rahemtulla was my original entry point, and his influence runs deepest. His contrarian instincts and expertise in options and international markets shaped the way I think about risk. Risk, in Karim’s world, is not something to avoid. It is something to measure, map, and price correctly. That idea became central to how I apply covered call strategies for clients today.
Steve McDonald, the editor of the Oxford Bond Advantage, gave me something the others couldn’t: a master class in fixed income. Steve regularly featured me in his writings as a Pillar One Advisor, and over the years a significant portion of my client work centered on bond portfolio management. That’s not a coincidence. Steve’s command of the bond market is exceptional, and learning from him taught me that if you want to understand the economy, you have to understand bonds first. The bond market doesn’t lie the way equity markets sometimes do. It tells you what the professionals actually believe about the future.
Why the Bond Market Still Matters
This is a point worth making directly, because it gets overlooked: most portfolio managers talk about stocks. Fewer genuinely understand bonds. And that gap matters, because the bond market is often the first place economic reality shows up.
Credit spreads, yield curves, duration risk. These aren’t just fixed income concepts. They are signals. A manager who ignores them isn’t managing risk; they’re hoping nothing goes wrong. I understood the macroeconomic context those strategies had to operate within.
That foundation never went away. We still actively manage bond portfolios for clients where fixed income is the right fit. Every client situation is different, and the right strategy depends on their goals, timeline, and income needs. For some clients, a well-structured bond portfolio is exactly the right answer. For others, a covered call approach through our Yield Forge system offers a flexible income alternative worth considering. What matters is that we understand both well enough to have that conversation honestly. We are not advocates for any single product. We are advocates for the right solution for each client.
From Research to a Real Portfolio
The Oxford Club gives you the “What” and the “Why.” My job is the “How.”
Reading good research is one thing. Translating it into a structured, disciplined portfolio for a real person, with real tax considerations, a real income need, and a real timeline, is something else entirely. That is the gap I’ve spent 30 years learning how to close.
For our clients, that means taking the income disciplines from Marc’s framework, the growth perspective from Alex’s work, and the risk-mapping instincts developed through Karim’s influence, and running them through an active management process tailored to each client’s situation. It means daily oversight, not quarterly check-ins. It means making the decision to exit a position before a client has to ask why we didn’t.
We’ve also built proprietary tools to support this process. Our options analysis system, Yield Forge, runs scenario modeling across bear, neutral, and bull conditions to identify covered call setups that generate income while maintaining downside protection. It’s the kind of analytical layer that didn’t exist when I started in this business. The fact that we built it ourselves reflects how seriously we take the execution side of the work.
What a Pillar One Relationship Actually Means for You
Being a Pillar One Advisor is not a title I take lightly. It means that when Oxford Club members come to us for portfolio guidance, we are not starting from scratch. We speak the same language. We’ve read the same research. We understand the strategies being discussed, because we have been building variations of them for decades.
The Oxford Club has been more than a research resource. It has been a proving ground for ideas, a community of serious long-term investors, and a source of intellectual discipline that sharpens everything we do. For our clients, that 30-year history translates directly into the quality of the advice they receive today.
The research is still good. The philosophy is still right. And the gap between understanding the research and building a lasting portfolio around it is still exactly where we live.
Ready to Put the Research to Work?
If you’re an Oxford Club member who has wondered what it looks like to work with an advisor who actually builds portfolios around these strategies, we’d like to talk. A Portfolio Stress Test takes 15 minutes and gives you a clear, honest picture of where you stand today and whether your current approach is aligned with your long-term goals.
Schedule a Portfolio Stress Test or learn more about how we work with clients.
Not an Oxford Club Member Yet?
If this article is your introduction to the Oxford Club, I’d strongly encourage you to look into it. The Oxford Club has been the most consistent source of independent, unconflicted investment research I’ve found in my four decades in this business. Their publications cover everything from income strategies to international markets to long-term wealth building, all written by people who have actually invested this way, not just theorized about it. For any serious investor who values independent thinking over Wall Street consensus, it’s worth your time and money. You can learn more at oxfordclub.com.
