Portfolio Director Web costs $9.95 per client per month, with a ten-client minimum. The one-time set up fee is based upon the number of reports made available to clients; each report costs $250.
Portfolio Director has the look and feel of a program that was originally designed for individuals, and then expanded and modified to accommodate professionals. (The manual also sounds like something written for the lay person.) As a result, it lacks some of the niceties that advisors expect, such as the ability to import client and account info from a custodian upon set up, a billing module, etc. The process of posting downloads from custodians is more cumbersome than it is with other programs. In short, as a professional portfolio management system, Portfolio Director is fairly rudimentary. Nevertheless, it is competent. It can compute returns and output a reasonable assortment of reports. Not all of the reports are as aesthetically pleasing as they could be, but they are acceptable, and they contain the necessary information.
Interfaces for several popular custodians are not yet available. They've got Schwab Institutional and AmeriTrade covered, but TD Waterhouse and Fidelity Institutional are lacking.
If you are a smaller firm that primarily invests client assets in individual stocks, straight bonds, mutual funds and listed stock options, this program may be all you need.
The Web service is a nice complement to the basic service. Those who use options hedging strategies will appreciate the ability to easily track open and closed options positions.
There were some things we liked about Portfolio Director, but because it requires more manual interaction than other programs, any upfront savings will be rapidly consumed by higher labor costs. The lack of some popular interfaces is problematic.
If your needs and your budget are limited, Portfolio Director may do the trick, but for an initial outlay of $1,500, the recently reviewed PowerBroker ($750 annually), represents a much better value. Portfolio Director has potential, but it still needs work.
Orion Advisor Services LLC
Orion Advisor Services LLC offers a comprehensive portfolio management and service bureau platform targeted primarily at advisory firms with $50 million or more in assets under management.
What would it cost if you managed about $150 million in assets and you wanted to outsource everything (and I mean everything) related to the maintenance of your portfolio management system? We're talking about data conversion from your current system to the new system, downloads, reconciliation, security, billing, mailing of performance reports, disaster protection and disaster recovery. If you engaged Orion Advisor Services to do it, the answer is probably between five to eight basis points, or between $75,000 and $120,000 per year. According to company spokesperson Bill Wostoupal, the exact fee would depend on the number of accounts, the average account size, the number of custodial downloads and the data conversion requirements.
According to Wostoupal, Orion was designed to meet the needs of Clarke Lanzen Skalla (CLS) Investment Firm LLC, an Omaha, Neb.-based RIA firm with more than $1.5 billion under management, which previously used dbCAMS, and later TechFi, for their portfolio management chores. Currently, the platform manages more than $4.1 billion for 54 advisory firms. So, if you back out the $1.5 billion of CLS money, there are 53 firms with average assets of just under $50 million using Orion's services.