We’re excited to announce that Barry Ritholtz has joined Riskalyze as a member of our advisory board.
Barry is CEO and Director of Equity Research at Fusion Analytics Investment Partners in New York City, a firm that uses Riskalyze Pro to serve clients as a fee-only registered investment advisor. He is also the author of 2008’s “Bailout Nation” and “The Big Picture” blog.
He is one of the few strategists who saw the financial crisis coming – specifically, the implosion of housing prices and its connection to the collapse of structured derivatives.
Barry’s belief in using quantitative data and behavioral economics to navigate the markets is deeply aligned with our mission to infuse the investing process with science. We’re thrilled to have him aboard as we work to revolutionize how advisors help their clients to make great investing decisions.
Advisors love Riskalyze Pro because they can take any set of investments — mutual funds, ETFs, stocks, third party funds or REITs — and instantly calculate the 95% mathematical probability of risk and reward for that portfolio.
But we noticed something interesting. The next step many of our advisors took was to play with removing funds, adding funds, or tweaking the allocations, in an effort to reduce the risk and increase the potential return of the portfolio.
Today, we’ve made that process a lot easier by launching Portfolio Heat Maps…three new analytics that help advisors visually identify the risk and reward, dividend yield and expenses hidden in their portfolios.
Here’s an example of a portfolio in its traditional view.
With a single click, the Risk/Reward Heat Map allows advisors to visualize how much risk and reward each investment is contributing to the portfolio.
In addition, advisors see a visual representation of the diversification benefits that each investment adds to the overall portfolio.
The Dividend and Expense Ratio Heat Maps allow advisors to see the overall dividend yield and expense ratio of a portfolio, and visually identify the investments that are contributing dividends…
…or driving expenses in the portfolio.
Portfolio Heat Maps are now live for all Riskalyze Pro users, including our Free Plan users. We’re excited to be delivering great tools to help advisors cut through the noise and discover great ways to continually add value to their clients.
Every good advisor has seen it: the prospective client who walks into their office with a portfolio that stinks to high heaven. Larded up with everything from bloated-fee mutual funds, to illiquid REITs, to IPO stocks, to complex debt derivatives, these horrid portfolios usually have way more risk than clients understand.
Today, our advisors use the Portfolios tool in Riskalyze Pro to share their risk analysis of these portfolios with prospects, and that’s been a key driver to help those advisors close the deal and win those new clients.
We hear so many of these horror stories that we wanted to give you advisors an easy, fun and hilarious way to share them with each other. So what better way to do that than a classic game of “Mad Libs?”
That’s why we’ve launched WorstWirehousePortfolios.com. With a few clicks, advisors can fill in the blanks and share their stories of harrowing encounters with horrid portfolios.
Here are a few of the great entries so far.
Michael, an advisor in California, shared about the 82 year old woman whose broker sold her Facebook IPO stock and had 87% of her money in stocks. Her portfolio has six month downside risk of -29%.
Jack, an advisor in Nevada, shared about a portfolio with -14% downside risk that he believes was reviewed every time a third party candidate has won the White House.
And Josh, back in California, shared about a portfolio with -15% downside risk and fees that could “probably support Charlie Sheen’s drug habit.”
If you’re an advisor, we hope you’ll share your Worst Wirehouse Portfolio story, and consider using the free tools in Riskalyze Pro to assess client risk tolerance, and build portfolios that fit within their expectations.
(And as we state in fine print at the bottom, if this joke of a web site makes you angry, please stop selling derivatives and penny stocks to grandmothers, and start using Riskalyze Pro instead.)
Fast Company Magazine today named Riskalyze to their 2013 list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, most specifically in the Top 10 in Finance.
This is an incredible honor and the credit really goes to an amazing team that have put their hearts and souls into this amazing product that is revolutionizing how investment decisions get made. I’ll just give them a quick shout out: thank you Matt, Levi, Tim, Ben, Dan, Mike, Julianne and Steve.
Thank you to Nancy Miller and the team at Fast Company for this honor. You’ve given us a lot to live up to during the next 12 months!
Since Riskalyze Pro launched, our advisors have created hundreds of risk questionnaires, which get sent to their clients via email. We’ve made a change to improve the deliverability of those email messages that we want our advisors to be aware of, and have the ability to change.
When a piece of software like Riskalyze Pro generates an email message, it has to set three variables inside the message: the sender’s name, the sender’s email address, and an email address that replies should go to.
One of the ways that spam filters try to stop junk email messages is by matching the sender’s email address back to the server that the message is coming from. If there’s no match, that increases the possibility that a given message is spam.
So we’ve made an important change. We’ve started setting the “sender’s email address” as advisor@riskalyze.com. We still leave the sender’s name as the name of your firm, and we ensure that all replies go back to your email address.
That ensures that spam filters will see a match between the sender’s email address and our servers, greatly increasing the probability of the risk questionnaire being safely delivered to your client’s inbox.
Here’s an example of how this looks to your client. Here’s a risk questionnaire email sitting in a Gmail inbox. As you can see, the name of the firm is who the message is from.
When the client opens the message, they see it in much the same way, but if you look closely, the sender’s address is advisor@riskalyze.com.
And if the client clicks reply to the message, they are immediately composing a message right back to your email address. We won’t receive a copy of that reply, nor will we even know if the client replied.
Now, a few questions you might have.
- What happens if a client manually addresses an email to advisor@riskalyze.com? That is a non-monitored mailbox. They will receive an automatic message back advising them to contact you directly, and we immediately delete their message for security reasons. (You can test this yourself by sending an email to advisor@riskalyze.com.)
- What if I absolutely must have the “sender email address” be my address? We can switch your account into “Manual Send” mode. This replaces the “Send Questionnaire” button with the ability to copy and paste the message text and link into your own email program, so you can send the questionnaire to the client like you would any other message. If you’d like us to switch your account into “Manual Send” mode, just make that request to support@riskalyze.com.
We’re committed to making Riskalyze Pro be a smooth and seamless part of your client interactions, and this change is an important part of that. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to let us know.
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