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Game-Changing Advisor Trends, With Cerulli and SMArtX

Game-Changing Advisor Trends, With Cerulli and SMArtX

FromSimple, but Not Easy


Game-Changing Advisor Trends, With Cerulli and SMArtX

FromSimple, but Not Easy

ratings:
Length:
41 minutes
Released:
May 9, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

Jonathan Linstra: Well, hello everyone. Welcome to Simple But Not Easy, the podcast live here in Chicago at the Morningstar Investment Conference. We're really excited to be here. It's been a fantastic conference so far. And the topic we're going to be covering today, I can't think of two better people that have. So, what we're going to be discussing today is advisor trends in general, we're going to explore a little bit about big problems that advisors are attempting to solve, we're going to talk about trends in product and trends in technology and explore each one of those areas. So, with me today, I'm really, really excited, we've got Evan Rapoport, who is the Founder and CEO of SMArtX, and we also have Matt Apkarian from Cerulli Associates. Matt is a member of Cerulli's Product Development Practice, which focuses on trends related to asset managers, product development and managed functions. He's also the lead author in a report that many in the room I would imagine have read already for Cerulli's U.S. product development and U.S. asset allocation model portfolio report. So, thanks for being here, Evan and Matt. Matt Apkarian: Thank you for having us. Linstra: Fantastic. So, before we get into it, we've got a lot to explore here in a limited amount of time and you've got so much great information. But we all know who Cerulli really is obviously. I think a lot of the advisors that are listening to us are already consuming their data and reports. But Evan, maybe for those that aren't as familiar with SMArtX, can you just give us a two-minute flyover, how did you start it, why did you start it and a little bit about – and also please mention as well full disclosure, we've got a very important strategic relationship with SMArtX and Morningstar. Tell us a little bit about that. Evan Rapoport: Sure. So, let me start off by saying how I got started actually. So, I was working within the hedge fund industry, and I've been doing that for about 10-12 years or so. And what we started to see was that more of our clients were looking for separately managed accounts as opposed to being an investor in the fund structure. The inefficiencies of a hedge fund structure, the structural inefficiencies are quite obvious, but 2008 really brought those to the surface where investors recognized that they didn't have transparency, liquidity, security, they were subject to style drift and other problems that they couldn't really stay on top of. And so, the separately managed account cures those issues by giving the client their own account where they have the transparency, liquidity, security. The problem, of course, is being able to administer both the hedge fund and the separately managed account at the same time. And so, we had a couple of technology that would allow our hedge fund managers to be able to operate their fund at the same time as us being able to manage the separately managed accounts that they were then commanding. And so, technology, of course that we developed allowed us to do that, and that's how we got started in this space. We did something that no one else had ever done, even to this day had never done in making strategies that are long-short, short-only, option-specific, market-neutral available in an SMA and an UMA construct. Now after we did that, the long-only folks saw what we were doing, recognized that the technology was far more advanced, they said it humbly, than the legacy unified managed account architecture that was out there and we then retrofit our technology to service the long-only part of the industry, understanding that the way in which we transact, which was for example, real-time or near real-time. So, a lot of the TAMPs and the UMA technology, they trade twice a day. We don't do that. We don't batch trade. We trade all day, every day, no windows, no cut-offs. So, that type of trading had never been done in the UMA space. In addition, the breadth of product that had never been offered for UMA, sleeve-based
Released:
May 9, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

Simple, but Not Easy is a podcast about investing and behavioral science by Morningstar Investment Management LLC. Most shows focus on our asset class research, our principled approach to managing money, or our insights on using behavioral science to help investors and advisors make better decisions.