Advisory Benefits

Deploying folioPilot offers several advantages for you and your clients. Here are some compelling arguments to incorporate folioPilot into your practice:

  • A Robust Tool Kit
  • Easy Customization
  • Downside Protection
  • Multiple Account Types
  • Cross-Selling Opportunities
  • Compliance & Regulations
  • Access to Experts
  • Reallocation of Time
  • Revenue Protection
  • Market Expansion
  • Next Generation Capture
  • Competitive Advantage
  • Summary
  • A Robust Tool Kit

    It's our understading that individual clients are, more and more, asking advisors for customized solutions for reaching their investment goals. That equates to the need to partner with those TAMPS who will give you what you need. folioPilot does just that, it gives you access to the tools necessary to transform a vanilla portfolio into something much more sophisticated and resilient. For example, a portfolio solution that actually responds to market conditions, pivoting out of risky assets early in a downturn and then rebalancing when the cycle improves.

    With folioPilot custom portfolios built in accordance with a customized investment thesis that's been pre-validated to meet your client's needs and goals are the norm, not the exception. folioPilot has been designed to do one thing really well, run client money at low cost. It does the heavy lifting allowing you to concentrate on what you do best: client acquisition, financial planning, and on-going relationship management.

  • Easy Customization

    folioPilot's open architecture allows you to offer clients a combination of proprietary and non-proprietary investment strategies for all custodial-available asset classes that offer greater flexibility, greater investment options, and a reduction of potential conflicts of interest. folioPilot was purposely designed to enable you to offer a broad array of investments which is now deemed essential to not only retaining high-net-worth individuals, but to attracting a new generation of investors who demand access to the same strategies and securities as their parents but at a much lower cost. In short, folioPilot provides you with a level of investment strategy sophistication and portfolio construction and management not available from other less sophisticated tools.

  • Downside Protection

    Based on our expreience, many advisors struggle with the delivery of true downside protection. Achieving it is not as easy as building diversified portfolios using passive investment vehicles. In truth, those vehicles become highly correlated in a major downturn which can play havic with the attainment of index beating returns during such market conditions. But investors crave downside protection and the index beating returns that come with it, in fact they demand it. To deliver that downside protection, folioPilot has taken a proprietary but proven approach. It employs tri-directional diversification; diversification across investment strategies within an investment vehicle class, diversification across investment vehicle classes, and finally, diversification across investment vehicles within a class. folioPilot's approach has been proven over the last three major down cycles to deliver the downside protection clients are seeking.

  • Multiple Account Types

    While its tempting to classify folioPilot into a single variety of TAMP functionality, folioPilot's added capabilities enables the support of multiple account flavors: Exchange-Traded Funds Wrap Accounts, Index Funds Wrap Accounts, Mutual Fund Wrap Accounts, Separately Managed Accounts, and finally Unified Managed Households. A single easy-to-use platform for all account types, nothing could be more efficient!

  • Cross Selling Opportunities

    folioPilot can be used as a gateway to cross-sell other financial products and services, such as insurance, retirement planning, or estate planning.

  • Compliance and Regulation

    folioPilot's rules-based approach helps to ensure compliance with ever-evolving financial regulations, reducing the risk of regulatory violations.

  • Access to Experts

    "The future of investing wll be active, automated, and intelligent across all asset classes and all investment vehicles." -- Michael Zugay; Former CEO BlackRock Capital

    Not every advisor has the tools, expertise or infrastructure needed to build the complex tools and platforms that BlackRock and other major TAMPS envision. But if you see your competitive future dependent upon your ability to operate digitally (read as efficiently and at low cost) then you should consider partnering with folioPilot, a Product TAMP that delivers modular, flexible tools with competitive differentiation now and into the future. Deploying folioPilot will ensure access to experts that have been in the field for over 30 years, a beneficial resource.

  • Reallocation of Time

    Since the financial crisis of 2008, there's been an increase in competition across the investment management industry, driven by a renewed commitment by incumbent firms, the emergence of new firms, and the arrival of new business models, e.g. robo-asset and asset wealth managers. Growth will depend upon your ability and the ability of your affiliated advisors to reallocate their time away from what is quickly becoming a commodity, asset management, to acquiring and retaining clients.

    Towards that end, outsourcing all or a portion of your asset management duties to folioPilot will not only improve client returns and provide the downside protection they demand, but increase the time available to generate value and to achieve growth in what is expected to become an ever increasing complex market.

  • Revenue Protection

    Commonly, advisor's revenue is directly linked to portfolio valuations, so performing at or under the market can cause a precipitous decline in revenue as clients become impatient during times of under performance. They may seek another advisor with better performance resulting in customer churn and high customer replacement costs both in terms of time and dollars. Why do so many advisors fail to provide superior returns and downside protection? Because the sole use of passive management and passive investment vehicles that have been purposefully designed to mirror the performance of the index they're mirroring makes superior risk-adjusted returns difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

    folioPilot offers an alternative which consists of actively managed, quantitative, smart-beta strategies where a strategy is chosen for each asset class represented in the portfolio, where multiple asset classes are represented in the portfolio, and where multiple securities are drawn from each asset class for inclusion in the portfoio. Such diversificatiion moves the mean-variance return for each asset class to the right. With the mean-variance return having been moved to the right, folioPilot achieves superior returns at a lower risk to that possible through the use of a passive solution thereby protecting portfolio values and, importantly, your revenue.

  • Market Expansion

    Today's advisories are disproportionately full-service and high-value, which is a high-cost business model that prevents them from targeting new, higher volume markets with lower levels of investable assets.

    Advisors who adopt technology and make it a part of their practice will have the ability to cost effectively expand their practice into new markets which can then feed their traditional, high-value core businesses. folioPilot has been designed to facilitate that process.

  • Next Generation Capture

    For many advisors capturing the next generation investor is a real challenge. They have different expectations than their parents and grandparents and their preferences have been shaped by new technologies and by their having lived through the last financial crisis. As a result, they're bringing new standards to the industry in terms of how investment products are to be delivered and how much they're willing to pay.

    folioPilot has been purposefully designed to meet those expectations by providing a total digital experience 24x7. Furthermore, folioPilot provides two things they want most from you, their advisor: (1) downside protection, and (2) access to the same investment products and strategies as those available to HNW and UHNW investors. folioPilot delivers both.

  • Competitive Advantage

    folioPilot operates 24/7 without human intervention, reducing labor costs. This can lead to cost efficiencies throughout your organization while making investing more affordable for the client. That said, building a TAMP in-house can take years and can cost millions of dollars assuming you have the expertise in-house. For those of you without that expertise, partnering with folioPilot can lead to a real competitive advantage in terms of build costs, time to market and attracting tech-savvy clients who value automation and data-driven decision-making.

  • Summary

    In summary, incorporating folioPilot into your advisory practice can lead to more time to service clients needs, offering the best of breed in investment management, operational cost savings and gained efficiency, scalable expenses in the event of a pandemic or a market collapse, a competitive advantage over other firms, boosting your firm's enterprise value, and gaining more relevancy in the marketplace.

Client Benefits

As you're likely aware, the asset management advisory industry is in the midst of significant change. Clients now demand investment products and strategies that were previously only available to a privileged few forcing providers to provide new solutions to their customers. This disruption to the traditional model has created an opportunity for innovative advisories to deliver to their clients a highly differentiated, highly credible digital solution, folioPilot, with the following compelling benefits:

  • Superior Returns
  • Downside Protection
  • Clear Communications
  • Strategy Stress Testing
  • Accessability
  • Digital Experience 24x7
  • Ease of Use
  • Superior Returns

    folioPilot's portfolios are built through the consistent application of a set of rules. The portfolio and the positions it holds are the by-product of the strategy being followed, not the basis upon which the strategy was built. While it might be nice, it's not a requirement nor is it expected that every position in a portfolio will be a winner. That said, the overall winning rate for folioPilot's model strategies is, on average, just under 71%, enough to consistently beat the indices the strategies are being measured against.

  • Downside Protection

    While the generation of Alpha is what most clients expect from advisors, they also expect it to be achieved at levels of risk equal to or less than the indices being tracked. In fact, downside protection is the number one benefit clients expect from their advisors. To deliver that downside protection, folioPilot employs tri-directional diversification; diversification across investment strategies within an investment vehicle class, diversification across investment vehicle classes, and finally, diversification across investment vehicles within a class. folioPilot's approach has been proven over the last three major down cycles to deliver the downside protection your clients are seeking.

  • Clear Communications

    folioPilot facilitates the clear communication of an investment thesis and how, as a result of a strict adherence to the thesis, sustainable Alpha has historically been achieved and how it will be achieved going forward. folioPilot provides total transparency into a strategy's buy, ranking, and sell rules which brings several benefits: they ensure consistent behavior; they remove emotion and other subjective judgements from consideration; and, they enable the validation of investment strategies over as many as 30+ years, the results of which are clearly displayed for the client to not only see, but to gain the confidence needed to accept the recommended thesis and the trades necessary to implement and maintain the portfolio built to implement it.

  • Strategy Stress Testing

    folioPilot's validation engine runs each of a strategy's rules each day of the testing period using the initial results to build a conforming portfolio. The system then manages that portfolio daily by monitoring the results of the simulation for recommended trades, executes them, and records the gain or loss, while periodically recording the portfolio's summary performance. It does that throughout the testing period. As a result, the user knows how often the strategy traded, what it bought, what it sold, and when it did it. What sectors it was in and for how long, what market caps it bought and when and for how long it held them, and importantly, the strategy's risk and drawdown history among many other performance measurements. By the end of the validation, the user gains a good sense of how the strategy is likely to perform over up-, down-, for flat-markets giving the client confidence in their overall investment approach. A confident investor who trades in accordance with a proven strategy will over time beat the market.

  • Accessability

    With folioPilot portfolio owners have access to the same asset classes and investment strategies that were previously only available to UHNW and large institutional investors; something next next generation investors are demanding.

  • Digital Experience 24x7

    Due to the cloud based nature of our service offering, our partners are able to offer their clients a total digital experience 24x7, again something the next generation of investor now demands.

  • Ease of Use

    folioPilot incorporates the latest of technologoies to faciliate it's ease of use either on a desktop or a mobile device. In an effort to quickly identify trends or anomalies in the results data, graphics have replaced data tables wherever possible. folioPilot also incorporates a comprehensive help system where every feature and function is fully explained.

Differing Technologies

We've been building FINTech technologies for over 36 years. Our clients have led us to the development of leading edge technologies for both trading and long-term investment. Here we distinguish between backtesting a trading strategy and the simulation of an investment strategy. Click here to learn more about how we're different from other TAMPS.

What is Backtesting?

Portfolio backtesting is the process of evaluating the performance of a portfolio trading strategy using historical market data to assess its potential effectiveness. This technique allows traders to quantify how a trading strategy might have performed in the past, offering insights into its potential future performance when applied to a real portfolio.

Generally, any trading idea that can be quantified can be backtested, but it requires programming the idea into a testable system using the trading platform’s customized language. Traders can incorporate user-specific input variables, allowing for adjustments during the backtest. For example, on some systems traders can determine the optimal moving average length by backtesting the portfolio based on historical data. This process helps validate trading strategies building trader confidence in their approach.

Backtesting can be an important tool for both institutional and individual traders. By reviewing a trading strategy's historical performance, traders can identify strengths and weaknesses in their approach, allowing them to refine their methods before applying them to real-world scenarios.



What is Simulaion?

Simulation, while somewhat similar to, and often confused with back testing, is the process of evaluating the performance of an investment strategy using historical data. Except in this case, historical fundamental data (revenue, cost of sales, gross margin, etc.,) is used in addition to market data to assess an investment strategy's potential performance. This technique allows long-term investors to validate their investment approach over various market conditions prior to funding.

Any investment thesis that can be quantified can be simulated, it requires defining a set of rules: (1) a set to define the universe of securities from which individual securities will be selected; (2) a set to define the rules under which the universe will be ranked from goodness to badness; (3) a set to define under what conditions a security that made it into the universe will be bought; and (4) a set to define under what circumstances a holding will be sold. Collectively, these rules define the investment thesis or strategy to be validated. Once defined, all rules are submitted to a validation simulator which builds a conforming portfolio as of the earliest date in the datasets, then marches through time a day at a time assessing whether or not the portfolio's holdings continue to conform to the strategy's rules. Those holdings that no longer do are sold and replaced with new ones that do. The simulation continues until it reaches the most current date in the dataset. Poorly performing strategies can then be modified and retested until the user's expectations for it have been achieved. Once selected for implementation, the platform builds a conforming portfolio (which the user can then fund) and monitors it daily recommending trades as appropriate.

Investment strategy simulation has emerged as an important tool for both institutional and individual investors. By reviewing a strategy's historical performance, an asset manager can identify its strengths and weaknesses across all markets, up, down, or sideways, allowing them to refine their approach before applying it to real-world scenarios. Additionally, simulation eliminates subjective judgement and emotional decision making, the downfalls of many investors.

folioPilot is simple to use, yet disruptive in terms of its sophistication

folioPilot is a cloud-based asset management platform designed to easily integrate into other technologies already in use to support and grow your businesses. It is the only platform based on intelligent, pre-validated, multi-investment vehicle class strategies where the rules of the strategies guide the selection and disposition of actively managed investment vehicles. It's highly differentiated and state-of-the-art.

Explore our Differentiation

Over the past 36 years we've served thousands of managers affiliated with some of the most notable names in the investment services sector, for example ...

former clients
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Supported TAMP Models

folioPilot supports five basic TAMP models: Mutual Fund Wrap Accounts, Exchange-traded Fund Wrap Accounts, Separately Managed Accounts, Unified Managed Accounts, and Unified Managed Household Accounts.

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Trading & Custodial
Integrations

Through our Trading Console, users can seamlessly access third-party trading and custodial platforms. This can further drive efficiency and deliver an ecosystem of best-of-breed providers.