The new feature set includes cash-flow stress testing. Advisors can use the platform to show clients a range of possible scenarios affecting their retirement portfolio, from benign to catastrophic, that anticipate, among other things, a global recession and a low interest rate environment.
Users can also deliver investment proposals as an interactive presentation with e-signature, which is well-suited to the current work-from-home environment many firms have adopted in response to the pandemic.
RetireOne Partners With Halo To Add Structured Notes To Platform
RetireOne, a Chicago-based independent platform for fee-based insurance solutions, has partnered with Halo Investments, a San Francisco-based platform for structured investment products.
A structured note is a hybrid security that helps an investor target a level of expected returns and protection levels over a set period of time. Issued by major financial institutions, these instruments aim to generate returns in up, down and flat markets.
Current low interest rates are pressuring RIAs to look beyond traditional fixed income for risk-off solutions, both companies said. Structured notes are a global investment product with more than $3 trillion of assets. But they are a relatively small part of the domestic market at just over $60 billion. Halo and RetireOne believe that, given recent market swings, low-cost structured notes have earned a place in client portfolios.
Using Halo’s structured-note trading platform, RetireOne’s RIA partners can now choose curated structured notes, or they can design, price and bid out custom-built solutions. The partnership also provides clients of RIA partners with the portfolio protections they want and need, but could not previously afford or did not have available to them.
The partnership is expected to help both firms grow distribution among some of the largest RIA firms in the United States.
Driehaus Launches Small-And Mid-Cap Growth Fund
Driehaus Capital Management, a Chicago-based independent boutique investment advisor founded in 1982, has launched a new small/mid-cap growth fund.
Lead portfolio manager Jeff James, portfolio manager Michael Buck, and assistant portfolio manager Prakash Vijayan will manage the firm’s new Driehaus Small/Mid Cap Growth Fund. James, Buck and Vijayan also manage the Driehaus Micro Cap Growth and Driehaus Small Cap Growth strategies and mutual funds.
Driehaus manages active growth equity strategies and alternative investment strategies for a diverse institutional client base of global corporate and public pensions, endowments, foundations, subadvisors, family offices, wealth managers and financial advisors.