CFP Board Center Releases Career Guide
The CFP Board’s Center for Financial Planning has released its Guide to Careers in Financial Planning for students, career changers and financial services professionals.
By using the new guide as a resource, readers can find out how to enter the field, determine whether they want to work for a small firm or a large one, learn about the personal and professional rewards of becoming a financial advisor and prepare themselves for the all-important first job interview of their new profession.
The guide can be downloaded free of charge on the CFP Board’s website, which also provides job seekers with available career opportunities and internships in financial planning.
AssetMark Launches Pooled Employer Plan
AssetMark, a financial technology company headquartered in Concord, Calif., has launched a pooled-employer plan called AssetMark PEP.
Pooled-employer plans, or PEPs, are 401(k) plans that allow owners of small to medium-sized businesses to pool their retirement assets with those of other employers, and to outsource the fiduciary and operational duties associated with plan sponsorship.
Under the SECURE Act of 2019, a PEP allows smaller employers with less than $25 million in plan assets to benefit from economies of scale and potentially lower costs while gaining access to diversified investments and enhanced fiduciary support usually available only to large corporate plans.
Quadratic Capital Introduces Deflation ETF
Quadratic Capital Management, a Greenwich, Conn.-based asset management firm, has launched the Quadratic Deflation ETF (BNDD).
Managed by Quadratic founder and CIO Nancy Davis, the BNDD seeks to profit from economic trends such as lower growth, deflation, lower or negative long-term interest rates and/or a reduction in the spread between shorter- and longer-term interest rates by investing in U.S. Treasurys and options.
The portfolio primarily consists of long-dated U.S. Treasury bonds, enhanced by a portfolio of options. The strategy is based on the tendency of bond prices to rise when interest rates fall during times of deflation, and also the tendency of options to increase in value with the compression of the spread between shorter- and longer-term interest rates.
The options within the BNDD portfolio are traded on the over-the-counter interest rate markets, which are typically not available to most investors.