Helios, a financial services company headquartered in the Sacramento suburb of Granite Bay, Calif., has appointed Eric Woodraska, CFA, to the Helios Client Experience Team, which works exclusively with financial advisors, the company said.
“Its important to us that our portfolio managers are committed to understanding Helios’ implementation process and maintaining a focus on quality,” Helios founder and CEO Chris Shuba said in a prepared statement. “It was clear to us from our first conversation with Eric that his wealth of knowledge will play a pivotal role in providing invaluable support to our clients.”
Woodraska will work with Helios product and research teams to source, develop and deliver support content that includes charts, research, and calculations that enhance the firm’s overall client experience for both financial advisors and their clients, the company said.
Prior to joining Helios, Woodraska served as regional director of advisor sales at Denver-based Pacific Life, and as an investment consultant for Harborside Group, also headquartered in Denver. He got his start in the financial services field while still enrolled at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, where he earned a B.B.A. degree in finance and economics in 2015. As an undergraduate student, Woodraska worked as lead research analyst at MidAmerica Securities Management Company from 2012-2015; as a trading/operations intern at Cambridge Investment Research in 2013; and as an equity analyst for the Krause Fund in 2014.
After graduation, Woodraska accepted an offer of employment with Houston-based American National, where he served as a financial securities analyst, before later joining Hancock Whitney as associate vice president, fixed income credit analyst.
In October 2022, Woodraska received his Finra Series 6 and 63 licenses.
Paul Burke, vice president of client experience at Helios, cited Woodraska’s education, training and experience as the basis for his appointment.
“Eric’s CFA designation and prior role as an investment consultant mean he possesses an ideal vantage point to comprehend the support needs of advisors,” Burke said in a news release.
In an email response for comment, Woodraska discussed his investment strategy. Asked whether he still believed that the 60/40 portfolio distribution was the best way to reduce client risk, Woodraska said yes.
“While diversification may not have provided the ballast that investors and advisors had expected or hoped for during 2022, it still remained the cornerstone of investing and the best way to properly manage market volatility and risk,” he said in the email. “Whether it’s the 60/40 or another mix that best suits an investor’s goals and risk tolerance, we don’t think anyone should be abandoning asset class diversification in a portfolio.”
For the past half-century, the 60/40 portfolio has been the allocation of choice for traditional balanced portfolios, with 60% invested in equities for the good times, and 40% invested in bonds for the bad. In 2022, the annualized return for the 10 years through 2022 was 6.1% for a globally-diversified portfolio, according to Vanguard.
Woodraska acknowledged that not all clients are wedded to investing solely in stocks and bonds; some prefer to pursue their passion as an alternative asset investment. He said that investors who are considering the addition of alternative assets to their investment portfolios should keep in mind that many collectibles share the same drawback - they cannot be as easily liquidated as a traditional investment vehicle.
“By definition, rare, hard-to-find collectibles have a smaller and therefore less liquid market,” he said in the email. “This can help or hurt someone when they either want to sell or are forced to sell their collection.”
Woodraska said that because most alternative asset classes can only deliver a return on investment upon liquidation at a profit, investors who park their money long-term in such investment vehicles, instead of more traditional ones, are potentially sacrificing a greater return on their investment.
“There is usually a high degree of emotional attachment to collectibles that give them their perceived value to investors,” he said in the email. “But for the most part, alternative assets do not provide any sort of cash flow similar to a typical investment. As we saw with the collapse of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), rarity by itself doesn’t mean something will hold its value; you need others to share that view and have the resources to be the next buyer.”
Founded in 2016, Helios Quantitative Research, operating under the brand name of Helios, specializes in asset management, estate planning, and portfolio tools for financial advisors. The company serves a global clientele of over 800 financial advisors managing a collective total of more than $30 billion in client assets.