It’s been quite a quarter and I’m particularly excited to share with you all that’s been going on behind the scenes. First, I’d like to introduce you all to my newest team member, Alex Cal. Alex is a fully registered Associate Advisor who will be helping me service my existing clientele while also taking lead on asset management and product research. Alex is a graduate of Central Connecticut State University with a BA in Finance and Accounting. He’s already been hard at work in his new role, and I expect you’ll hear from him in a variety of formats over the coming months and years.
Portfolio Changes
One of the first tasks Alex helped me with is my quarterly Portfolio Showdown. This is a quarterly breakdown of all my portfolios analyzing performance, composition, and how well they met their stated goals. This quarter we’ll be making changes to my Core Portfolios in the Aggressive and Moderately Aggressive risk categories. While we’ll continue to work with Frontier and Blackrock, we will be changing to Blackrock’s ESG strategy. This change comes due to that strategy’s superior performance relative to its benchmark and lower downside capture compared to its immediate peers. Expect these changes to go live in the first few weeks of the quarter, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Looking Ahead
With Alex in place, I’d like to give you a glimpse at what we’re looking to do in the coming months. First, next quarter’s Portfolio Showdown should be particularly eventful as we do a deep year end review and audit all portfolios against both their benchmarks and their peers. Also, on a related front we’ll start the process of shadow trading portfolios. This will be a test run before making the decision on whether to bring asset management in house. If these tests go well, you can expect portfolios to be even more closely tailored to your needs with lower fees to boot! This has been a plan of mine for the last 3 years and I’m excited to be taking these concrete steps to make it happen. I hope to have preliminary findings in hand by the second quarter of 2022.
Lastly, I’ve been asked several times about the return of in person seminars. COVID-19 really stopped seminars in their tracks last year and I’ve hated to see such an integral part of my practice put on hold. As such, it is with great joy that I announce in person seminars will be returning in 2022! With the support of my growing team, we have a busy calendar planned for 2022 with both virtual and in person events on offer. I also hope to bring back fun events that are all about showing you, the client, my appreciation while enjoying a good time.
Wrapping Up
Like I said, it’s been a busy quarter and with double the manpower we’re looking forward to doing even more in 2022. I’ll also add that with onboarding Alex behind me, I hope to get back to writing more of these blog posts and other direct client communications. Thank you all for reading and I look forward to talking to you all soon.