FP Alpha Updates Roth Conversion Tool
FP Alpha, a New York City-based AI-driven advanced planning platform for financial advisors, has released a second-generation Roth conversion tool that lets advisors identify how much in clients’ IRA retirement funds to convert to Roth IRAs (and when), all with the click of a button.
The new enhancements to the Roth Conversion Simulator include its increased functionality and the calculation flexibility within the tool, which lets advisors customize inputs such as conversion amounts, the years the client will convert and the kickoff age. Additionally, the tool displays the effects of the conversion on both the Roth account and traditional IRA account, as well as total taxes paid over the client’s lifetime.
The simulator is part of FP Alpha’s tax module. Advisors simply upload a client’s tax returns, and the platform’s AI will read and extract the data in a matter of minutes, saving valuable time and resources.
FP Alpha was founded in 2020 by Andrew Altfest, the president at Altfest Personal Wealth Management.
Morningstar Launches Annuity Intelligence Center
Investment research firm Morningstar has launched the Annuity Intelligence Center within its Morningstar Advisor Workstation. The platform will simplify a financial advisor’s process of transacting annuities on behalf of clients. The platform is powered by Luma Financial Technologies. It combines educational material, comparison functionality, and widespread product accessibility to help advisors manage their clients’ entire annuity experience.
The platform equips advisors with a single solution for all annuity product types, including variable annuities, fixed index annuities and registered index-linked annuities. It’s designed to encompass the entire annuity workflow.
PreciseFP Offering Consolidates Client Engagement Workflows
PreciseFP, a platform from Docupace for communicating with and gathering data from advisory clients, in December announced the launch of its new enterprise engagement model, which is designed to consolidate multiple data-gathering workflows to elevate the service experience for firms, financial advisors and their clients while maximizing the value of existing technology expenses.
Docupace acquired PreciseFP in October 2021. The firms joined forces to create a consolidated data-gathering product using both firms’ expertise for large enterprise wealth management firms.
The new engagement model aims to help wealth management firms deal with their personnel’s duplicative data-gathering activities. It covers everything from client prospecting, new account opening and ongoing administrative tasks.
PreciseFP eliminates manual data entry by digitizing the entire client engagement process—automatically filling in custodial forms and sharing data with CRMs, financial planning software, and other tools that advisors already use.
Robinhood Launches Retirement Product
Robinhood Markets Inc., the commission-free trading platform headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., has launched Robinhood Retirement, an IRA with a 1% Robinhood match for every dollar contributed.
The firm said it designed its retirement platform for young, self-employed gig economy workers with side jobs, many of whom don’t have access to retirement platforms.
The customers are now able to open multiple Robinhood brokerage accounts. Earnings can grow either tax-free or tax-deferred, which means customers will save on taxes while saving for their future, even if they have a 401(k) elsewhere.
Customers can invest in stocks or ETFs through either a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA.
YieldMax Launches Two New ETFs Designed For Yield
In mid-December, Tidal Financial Group, a leading ETF investment and technology platform, said it had launched two ETFs: the YieldMax TSLA Option Income Strategy ETF (TSLY) and the YieldMax Innovation Option Income Strategy ETF (OARK). Both funds are actively managed by ZEGA Financial.
The TSLY fund pursues a synthetic covered call strategy on Tesla Inc., while the OARK fund pursues a similar strategy on the ARK Innovation ETF managed by Cathie Wood. The strategy of each fund seeks to provide current monthly income and capped participation in price gains.
The covered call strategy allows these ETFs to take advantage of the volatility in individual stocks and ETFs. The aim is to produce significant monthly income for investors.
WisdomTree Launches U.S. Quality Growth Fund
WisdomTree Inc., headquartered in New York City, has launched a fund that seeks to track the price and yield performance of the WisdomTree U.S. Quality Growth Index.
This index takes the top 500 companies by market cap and then evaluates them for quality and growth. After that, it comes up with a composite score based on these two characteristics, weighting them equally. The growth factor takes into account things like analyst earnings forecasts and trailing five-year EBITDA. The quality factor uses metrics like return on equity. When a composite score is arrived at, the 100 companies with the highest composite score go into the index.
The new fund based on this index, the WisdomTree U.S. Quality Growth Fund (QGRW), was launched December 15, 2022. The fund has an expense ratio of 0.28%.