(Washington)

Sneaking in right after Christmas and just before a change of administration, the SEC has announced an important rule change that affects all advisors. In particular, the SEC has updated a rule that has not been touched in decades and was increasingly out of touch with reality. The change has to do with marketing communications, particularly those through internet channels. According to Barron’s, “The new regulation also allows financial advisors to use testimonials, endorsements, and third-party ratings to woo potential clients, as long as they meet certain conditions”. SEC chief Jay Clayton commented that “The marketing rule reflects important updates to the traditional advertising and solicitation regimes, which have not been amended for decades, despite our evolving financial markets and technology. This comprehensive framework for regulating advisers’ marketing communications recognizes the increasing use of electronic media and mobile communications and will serve to improve the quality of information available to investors”.

FINSUM: Advisors have had to tread very lightly in digital communications/advertising for years because of a high degree of uncertainty about what was permissible. This goes a long way towards making that very clear.

(New York)

The new year brings many opportunities for advisors. One which is not utilized enough is the implementation of goals-based investing. The new year naturally brings a focus on goals, resolutions, and planning, making it the perfect time to get clients to commit to defining their goals and how their portfolios can get them there. Goals-based investing has been known to help get clients to really commit to their investments and stay in the market for the long haul.

FINSUM: This approach can get help clients get more bought into their own planning and strategies and help give meaning to why they are saving/sacrificing/investing. Just make sure the goals they give are genuine, as many clients will not put enough thought into describing these. There are also a number of funds that directly cater to a goals-based approach.

(New York)

2020 was a very unique year for recruiting. In particular, despite the obvious market and economic turmoil, it was a year in which almost all aspects of going independent got more favorable. Not only did working from home making recruiting conversations with new firms easier, but working from home itself made going independent seem less daunting. Further, firms’ appetite to offer great packages to recruit has grown considerably since this time last year, so it is certainly an advisors’ market when it comes to moving.

FINSUM: One other point to mention here is that clients themselves have also gotten more comfortable with their advisors being independent. The lack of office visits and growth of Zoom communication has limited the need for the big well-known logo in the office lobby when clients arrive. Independents seem likely to gain more market share.

(New York)

The annual next-year forecast cycle for Wall Street’s investment banks is in and some of the findings are interesting. As usual, banks are fairly bullish. However, that was certainly not automatic this year given the huge tumult in markets in 2020. One particular forecast stood out—Goldman Sachs. The bank’s research team, led by David Kostin, has its official 2021 S&P 500 price target as 4,200, or just about 14% ahead of today. Interestingly, the bank also thinks gold is going to rise strongly, from the mid 1,800s today to 2,300. According to Kostin, “On absolute metrics like price/earnings...the market is very expensive relative to its history, in the 90th percentile or greater … But relative to interest rates, the stock market is somewhat attractively valued. Those are two different stories—absolute valuation versus relative valuation”.

FINSUM: As tough as it is to swallow on a historical basis, we think the interest-rates measured basis for current valuations makes a great deal of sense.

(New York)

Many wealth management firms find themselves challenged by female clients. The industry has long been dominated by male advisors, and many firms have been slow to adapt to the needs of female clients. The increasing asset controlled by women has created more urgency to rectify this issue, and one approach that might aid in understanding how to better serve women is goals-based investing. According to one firm that has been very successful with female clients, “Women have to understand why they are doing stuff”. According to studies, meeting financial goals is more important to women than to men, and women tend to put more thought and work into defining the goals for their finances. Thus, making sure to deeply understand goals and explaining how certain investing/wealth management approaches will meet them is integral in making women feel comfortable.

FINSUM: Goals-based investing has many utilities in wealth management, and this one applies to a critical industry issue.

(Washington)

The House Financial Services Committee sent a very strong message to president-elect Joe Biden this week: dissolve Reg BI. Chaired by Maxine Waters, the committee said that the Trump administration had "taken several actions that have eroded shareholder rights, established regulatory barriers to shareholder engagement, increased issuer involvement in the proxy voting advice process and stripped away fundamental investor protections, including safeguards around private markets, where investors have few protections”, and that Biden should take care of the issue by getting rid of Reg BI, and separately, CRS altogether.

FINSUM: Industry experts seem to agree that the Biden Administration is unlikely to completely unwind Reg BI, if only because getting a new rule through would require Congressional approval. While that could still happen depending on how the Georgia runoffs go, it seems more likely the new SEC team would just employ very strict enforcement of Reg BI.

(New York)

Goals-based investing and planning is a well-known, but not greatly understood topic within asset and wealth management. The idea of goals-based investing is to make the goals for investment clear so as to match them to life needs and keep motivation high for clients. However, many advisors do this incorrectly and resultingly think it is ineffective. The main problem is always that advisors don’t take enough time to truly understand their clients’ goals. Many clients, when posed question about goals, will give half-hearted answers that they think they should say (e.g. a comfortable retirement). It is on advisors to dig deeper and truly understand what they want. For example, a client who is fully engaged might say they want to buy a retirement home on the coast when they are 65 and afford to give their daughter a six-figure wedding.

FINSUM: If the goal that you are trying to align investment to isn’t completely genuine for the client, then it doesn’t truly serve as motivation. That said, true insight into what a client wants can deliver enormous value.

(New York)

Goldman Sachs went on the record with a bold call last week. They told investors that despite all the fears in the market, a big correction WAS NOT coming. Alessio Rizzi and his team at Goldman say that many indicators are showing a bullish outlook, and that big losses don’t seem likely. According to Rizzi, “more moderate risky asset returns are likely from here, rather than an imminent risk of a sizable correction”. One indicator Goldman cited as very bullish was the ratio between puts and calls. Right now the market is deeply favoring calls, with the ratio nearing the limits of its normal distribution.

FINSUM: So bulls look at this and say “aha, I’m right, the market will rise”; and bears say “exactly as expected, this is a contrarian indicator”! In our opinion, on the whole, there is plenty to be optimistic about.

(New York)

Tech shares have been doing very well recently. This has given rise to renewed fears of overvaluation and a market correction. In the ten days leading up to December 8th,the Nasdaq 100 jumped 5.3%. While this makes some nervous after a year of huge gains for tech, history tells us this likely means more gains are coming. There have only been 10 times ion history when the Nasdaq 100 went on a ten-day winning streak, and the average gain in the year following was 19%.

FINSUM: The point here is that even if value stocks do well—which they have been as the economic outlook has brightened—tech stocks don’t look bearish by any means.

Did you know that most advisors spend 5.5 hours per week handling investment management related tasks like searching for funds? That stat comes from Kitces.com and does a good job highlighting what has become an increasingly difficult problem for advisors: how to find the right funds when there is an ever-increasing ocean of options, including many that look very similar. Between screeners with limited criteria (I want “value ESG”, not just “value”) and the pain of cross-asset class searches, finding funds has increasingly become a real quagmire for time and effort. Imagine if you could have three extra hours per week to focus on new client acquisition instead of cycling through drop-down menus trying to find funds? Well, a company called Magnifi has a great new tool to help you do just that. For example, international stocks are getting some attention from Wall Street analysts right now because of their favorable valuations versus US stocks. However, finding the right international funds is even harder than doing so for domestic stocks. For example, you might want to find the best ETFs focused on Asia. Because of the antiquated architecture of existing fund screeners, it would take hours of work to pin down funds in the right fee range and with the right composition. Instead, Magnifi uses natural language search to immediately display and compare all the relevant funds for your query. For example, here are the results for searching “China Value Funds”.

Another great thing about Magnifi is that they incorporate FI360’s fiduciary risk score for every fund, allowing you to incorporate that element for clients and rest easy with concern to regulations.

FINSUM: In our view, Magnifi is the best way to search and filter investments, period. Once you try it out you will quickly move on from the many ETF “screeners” available.