The Trusted Investment Advisor

Concentrated Stock Positions: The Backroom Joke of Wall Street A concentrated stock risk rating gives an idea of how much of a concentration in a given stock exists in the portfolio. The world’s wealthiest people have the most concentrated stock…

The investment year is divided into 252 days. On most days, investors know what will happen, but they don’t know how the financial markets will respond. A variety of analytical methods help anticipate how stocks will react to earnings reports…

I’ve been advising StratiFi on its risk assessment and risk management software offering in large part because it encompasses stock concentration in its risk metrics.  Over many years I’ve advised hundreds of clients and have spoken to thousands – in…

I recently sat down with Justin Lowry of Global Beta Advisors for a webinar to discuss the embedded risks in Low Volatility and Dividend Strategies that are overlooked and may be even misunderstood. If you invested in low volatility ETFs…

This series intends to illuminate a pathway that will help advisors safeguard their practices and investor accounts. At StratiFi, we believe in a much greater focus on defining and managing risk. A risk approach is widely used among institutional investors,…

Risk has always been present for investors. It used to be that a diversified stock and bond portfolio was usually enough to protect clients from the worst of the financial markets and global economy. As clients aged or grew more…

SEC Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI) became effective on June 30, 2020, a little more than a year after the SEC formally adopted it. Reg BI established a “best interest” standard of conduct for broker-dealers when making recommendations to retail…

When visiting a new country, the best way to find your way around is to map out the directions. You will also want to make an activity plan for all you’ll do once you get there. Your financial future is…

As a financial advisor, you already know how unprecedented it is for a global health pandemic to impact the U.S. stock market powerfully. The incredible volatility that we are experiencing due to COVID-19 has been gut-wrenching for many, and your…

As families all over the nation focus on the health of loved ones, financial advisors play a significant role in helping clients take financial control of their lives. Although our client’s job security, steady income levels, and stock market prices…

Stay at home. No groups of more than two outside. Social events canceled. These are words financial advisors don’t want to see as they are trying to grow their business. Networking right now has changed, you are no longer able…

Over the last number of years, you likely had to tell your clients the importance of being defensive. This is despite markets rallying to new highs month after month, year after year (except for 2018, of course). Why were you…

These are stressful times. When the markets are strong, advisors can keep their client base on autopilot and can grow at the pace they want. However, at times like these, when markets are incredibly volatile, your client base is stress…

If you thought the last few weeks in the markets were bad, you did not go to bed very happy Monday evening on March 3rd. Market breakers got triggered, and it was a historic day in the stock market one…

When clients hire financial advisors, there’s an expectation that their advisor will work with them to develop an investment strategy that reflects their investment profile. That’s what advisors do. And, for that, advisors are evaluated based on how those strategies…

Warren Buffett has been accused of “investing like a girl,” a charge to which he has proudly professed his guilt. The world’s most successful investor is patient and exercises self-control, muted confidence, and discipline because he strictly adheres to his…

As regulatory activity in the wealth management industry hits a fever pitch, financial advisors and their firms are increasingly finding themselves at odds with compliance departments who are under increasing pressure to keep their firms out of trouble. In some…

There are few things more life-changing than a liquidity event. It takes extensive preparation – financially and emotionally – to ensure the successful transition of wealth so that it can be preserved and used in the pursuit of new ambitions.…

After a nearly 14% gain in the first four months of the year, the MSCI EAFE index slogged through a 3% decline in the month of May, triggering concerns by advisors that it may be over for international stocks. Our…

You are your brand. Your brand is you. You may never think that this is a top business priority as a financial advisor, but your clients – current and prospective – crave insightful information. If you provide this to them…

The future is now. Financial advisors who can see it, and grab it, have an advantage over their competitors. While it is popular for some financial advisors to lament the rise of robo-advisors, the fact is that robo-advisor firms control…

For many financial advisors, email marketing is an effective way to communicate with their target market. Advisors favor email because, once it’s set up, it is easy to manage – simply Define a campaign, create content, send it out, measure…

Most financial advisors begin their careers as generalists, offering a full range of investment and insurance products to anyone who will see them. Some remain as product salespeople while others develop the knowledge, skills, and credentials to perform comprehensive financial…

Today, the vast majority of a financial advisor’s potential clients reside in a parallel universe called social media – a digital cosmos that exists alongside the physical world. It’s a place where they commune with friends, including people they really…

Most financial advisors understand the value of an ideal client profile in helping them identify the type of prospects they should pursue to grow their practice. While that may have been useful in the past, it does very little to…

The greatest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history is underway. As a financial advisor, it represents either an unprecedented opportunity or a threat to your survival. It will ultimately come down to trust The financial advisory industry has a trust…

For much of the past decade, advisors have benefitted from market-driven growth. As the markets advance, assets under management increased. Now, as the bull market trounces onward in this, its 10th year, financial advisors are increasingly thinking about something that…

When Howard Marks speaks, it pays to listen. The chairman of Oaktree Capital recently sat for a lengthy interview with Shane Parrish of Farnam Street in which he covered many key issues, including risk management,  the role of luck and…

In February 2019, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index hit a new high, less than two months after one of the worst one-month declines on record. From its December 24, 2018 low, the S&P 500 has gained nearly 20%, brushing…

For much of the past decade, investment profits have flowed to anyone who simply bought stocks and sat tight. But now the stock market is beginning to show signs of aging. Volatility is increasing, and many investors believe that a…

One of the key lessons of the 2018 investment year is that extreme volatility can wreak havoc on investment portfolios, even those that are thought to be relatively safe due to diversification. For some investors, the answer to those problems…

Steven M. Sears, StratiFi’s chief investment officer, recently focused on some of the key attributes of successful investing in a column that he wrote for Barron’s. At a time when many investors are debating what happens next to the stocks,…

The recent stock market decline  is a stark reminder to investors that there is risk in index funds. This is coming as a shock to many. After years of quantitative easing, artificially low-interest rates and, more recently, a “Trump bump,”…

In 2018, volatility in the stock market returned with a vengeance, catching most investors and many advisors off guard. Advisors, who have experienced at least a couple of market cycles, understand that volatility is normal and market pullbacks are temporary,…

One thing we can say for certain is that, after a 10-year bull run with minimal volatility, the market is due for a change. With the return of extreme volatility this year and a late year selloff, the market may…

You have an online presence, either intentionally or unintentionally, or both. Go ahead and “Google” yourself or the name of your firm. Does anything come up on the first page of search results? Keep looking, you’re there, somewhere. Hopefully it…

Leading RIA firms understand that the key to profitable growth is to optimize their ability to specialize in their core business functions of client management and business development, while effectively managing the complexity of growing investment and back-office operations.  But,…

Call it what you will – cynicism, disillusionment, enlightenment – an increasing number of clients are no longer willing to tolerate product-centric recommendations masking as financial advice. Increasingly, they are beginning to question the value of investment advice that isn’t…

More than any other type of professional advisor – be it a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant or a counselor – financial advisors have an extraordinary opportunity to build a profitable business around unique abilities that can be shared with…

It has been nearly a decade since the global financial crisis and, while investors are beginning to regain their confidence in the markets, many are still having difficulty overcoming the trust deficit created by financial advisors who treated them as…

The top 1% of Americans now control over one-third of the nation’s total investable assets. These high-net-worth (HNW) investors are the proverbial golden geese sought by many advisory firms. And why not? More assets per client; and the more you…

Your client is worth $25 million, yet you only manage a small portion of that total. Sound familiar? The issue of clients with accounts spread across multiple advisory firms often arises during discussions of a firm’s billable assets. Yet, the…

Interest rates are rising. If your clients are asking how you’re moving to protect their capital, you’re not alone. Global money market funds saw the largest inflows of any open-end fund class in the first quarter of 2018, according to…

If you follow financial industry trades or perhaps just skim the headlines, you know the term “risk” is omnipresent. It’s not surprising given the entire investment world is loosely balanced on a grand scale of risk and return. Not every…

When Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber, was asked why he robbed banks, he answered because that’s where the money is. And so it is with the stock market. Most people invest because they want to make as much money…

Everyone wants to make money in the stock market so we’re going to let you in on a secret. The way to make $1 million on Wall Street is to start with $2 million. If you’ve been around the markets…

Do your clients trust you? Do they think you are indispensable or an easily replaced commodity? We’re asking those questions in a spirit of helpfulness. Trust and commoditization are among the securities industry’s greatest weaknesses and challenges. If clients do…

We live in an era when investors have more information readily available than the world’s most accomplished investors ever imagined just 50, or even 100 years ago. Still, many people complain that it is hard to find useful information in…

At a recent Barron’s conferences for the nation’s top advisors, we were surprised by a recurring topic: Amazon.com. Everywhere we turned, someone was discussing how Amazon.com was impacting their businesses. The online retailer, at least since we last checked, has…

Of all the risk factors that confront investors, concentrated-stock risk is perhaps the sweetest. If you have this risk in your portfolio, you likely picked a stock that has blossomed in value, or you participated in an initial public offering…

One of the market’s wise men – someone who is known and respected by everyone but shuns the limelight – believes the financial markets represent pure chaos. He contends that indexes, and exchange-traded funds and other financial products exist to…

At this very moment, some advisor, somewhere in the securities industry, is confronting a difficult reality with their clients. They know that bonds are often as risky as stocks, and that stocks and bonds often behave like each other. Yet,…

Volatility is one of the most widely used, yet misunderstood, words in the investment world. It means so many things to so many people that volatility is at risk of becoming another Wall Street word that does not mean much…

Winston Churchill once quipped that America and England are two countries separated by a common language. We have often thought of this as our travels, and lives, keep us alternating between Wall Street and Main Street. On Wall Street, most…