It’s been a great few months for Riskalyze as a company.
We were named by Fast Company to the World’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Finance, and out of those nine peers, we’re the only one serving investment advisors. Today, hundreds of advisors across the country are using Riskalyze Pro to win new clients, pinpoint risk expectations and build portfolios to fit them.
We’re not resting on our laurels though. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of a brand new experience for managing risk questionnaires and portfolios in a client-centric view.
When you log into your Riskalyze Pro account, the Clients tab is now the default view, with a simple set of “cards” that allow you to organize your clients in active, prospect, lead or archive categories.
Once you’ve clicked in to a client’s profile, you can manage all of the data for that client in one simple view: all of their past and current risk questionnaires, and all of their past and current portfolios.
We’ve also made it possible to see the history of a client’s Risk Fingerprint, and create clients and risk questionnaires without necessarily having the client’s email address on hand.
Client profiles are immediately available in your Riskalyze Pro account today, and are included for advisors on the full version, and the Free Plan.
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.
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.
Our vision is nothing short of transforming investing from something based on hunches, gut instincts and emotion, into a process based on science and data.
We started delivering that vision with Riskalyze.com for self-directed investors in early 2012. Our users built over $2 billion in portfolios last year, with the product featured in Barron’s, the New York Times Bucks Blog and on NPR.
Mere weeks ago, we delivered on that vision for advisors with the launch of Riskalyze Pro, which empowers investment advisors to win new clients, pinpoint risk expectations and design and analyze portfolios.
Today, we mark a third huge milestone in our history. We’re excited to announce that we’re going to equip every single investment advisor in the United States with the ability to align the risk in their portfolios with the risk tolerance of their active and prospective clients.
And we’re going to do that at an amazing price: $0.
With the Free Plan, advisors will be able to capture a basic snapshot of risk tolerance from their active or prospective clients, and mathematically match those clients with the appropriate asset class allocations for their risk tolerance.
Of course, it’s our hope that a lot of advisors joining the Free Plan will upgrade to the full-powered version of Riskalyze Pro. For just $99/month, they’ll gain:
- Deeper insights from prospective and active clients, like investment amount, financial situation and full risk/reward logic
- Existing portfolio analysis for prospective clients, using the exact funds or stocks that they currently own
- Customized model portfolios, using any publicly traded ETFs, mutual funds, stocks or custom investments you choose
- Advanced portfolio analytics, including interest rate forecasting and dividend yield analysis
- Marketing tools, including our personalized drip email engine
But even if an advisor never decides to upgrade to the paid plan, we want every single one of them to freely use Riskalyze Pro to grow their practice and protect their clients, with no obligation and no cost.
Riskalyze Pro is exclusively available to investment advisors (licensed as RIAs or Registered Reps). Instant account validation is available for advisors at many firms, and the rest are approved and receive their account access within 1-2 business hours.
Advisors can open their free account at pro.riskalyze.com.
How many times have we heard the disclaimer that “past performance isn’t necessarily a predictor of future success?” In investment advisor circles, that rule is carved in granite.
Even worse, there are times when a consensus forms that the future is quite likely to be distinctly different from the past. Today, that’s the bond market. With record-low interest rates being held down by artificial Federal Reserve action, many advisors strongly believe the bond market is in for some big pain.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve launched Interest Rate Forecasting. It’s the first-ever way for advisors to quickly and easily model their own assumptions about interest rates into the risk analysis for a portfolio.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say an advisor parked 70% of a client’s money in “safe” government treasuries…say 35% in TLT and 35% in TLH. The other 30% is in the stock market. Using the last five years of history, that suggests the portfolio has downside risk of -6% over the next six months.
Now let’s turn on the Interest Rate Forecast. What if rates rise 0.25%? That drives the portfolio risk up by 200 basis points to -8%. And if rates rise 0.5%? Risk skyrockets another 400 basis points to -12%.
That’s right. Interest rates climbing just one half of 1% would double the downside risk of this portfolio from -6% to -12%.
For a less extreme example, just apply the Interest Rate Forecast to building a portfolio using the Optimal Allocation tool. If your client’s goal is Capital Preservation, a flat interest rate environment would put 35% in bonds, 10% in stocks and 55% in cash.
But increase the interest rate forecast to just +5 bps, and the bond allocation drops to 17%, stocks drop to 9% and cash jumps up to 74%.
Riskalyze Pro delivers unprecedented visibility for advisors to measure, understand and align the risk in their portfolios with the risk tolerance of their clients. Interest Rate Forecasting is just one more great addition to this unique suite of tools that make risk an advisor’s best friend.
Interest Rate Forecasting is live today for all Riskalyze Pro customers. If you’d like a free trial for Riskalyze Pro, just register here and we’ll be in touch.
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