solutions that work

Let’s be honest. We’ve all fallen prey from time to time, present writer not excluded, to jargonitis (or its sister malady acronymbia). After all, who doesn’t love a good term that no one but industry insiders really understand? Adding alpha, bottom up, top down, smart beta, SMA, UMA, you name it, it all sounds impressive.

  We’re often called on by our investment advisory clients to help them select the TAMP best suited to improve their operational efficiency and grow their businesses. These search and due diligence exercises invariably included two names, FolioDynamix and Envestnet. For firms primarily focused on model management in an open architecture format, these two have

Image from Apple.com Last week, Apple unveiled the latest and greatest in its lineup of iPhones, Apple Watches and Apple TV. By far, the lion’s share of publicity has been garnered by the two new iPhones coming out, the iPhone 8 and the X. For anyone who has been able to ignore the constant bombardment

I recently received several printed pieces in the mail that I actually opened and read. The purpose of any communication is to resonate with its intended audience, which is hopefully the senders’ target audience. The first successful promotion sent via “snail mail” to my home was the brochure for the American Ballet Theatre. The incredible

                Whether you’re helping your clients accumulate or preserve their assets, making rational recommendations based on the numbers can be the easy part. To really get it right, you might want to trade your CFA for a PsyD. That’s because, for many investors, emotional behavior, particularly during times

Last week the Twitter hashtag celebrated its 10th birthday. For those interested in a little history, the hashtag was created by designer Chris Messina, who asked on August 23, 2007 the innocuous question “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” For those burning to know what the heck

The rise of liquid alternatives funds appears to have peaked. The chart below shows the annual asset levels and net flows of open end liquid alt funds since their introduction during the Financial Crisis. While the number of liquid alts continues to rise, total assets for these products have started to decline and cash flows

Work we’ve done on pricing recently has gotten us thinking about that intersection of supply and demand that defines optimal pricing. When should a price be raised or lowered? When is a price excessive, fair or too generous? First movers in an emerging category often have the luxury of naming their own price. They’re ahead