Who manages your funds?

May 31, 2018 6:45 pm

Full disclousure: I'm here to ask questions regarding how financial advisors manage their clients funds. Quick bits about me are that I have my masters in finance from a top 3 school in finance. My background includes spending years at Morgan Stanley (non-wealth management roles). I left MS a while back to build my investment management track record (trading) so that I can start my investment management company. My performance is great but my AUM is only 500k. I started with 10k two years ago and grew my account. Most of the funds are my personal funds and some were allocated to me by family and friends. I'm having the hardest time raising capital from investor (hedge funds/CTA/CPO etc.) I'm registered with the NFA for futures and foreign exchange related activities.

Question: As a financial advisor, who actually manages your funds?

My understanding is that, most financial advisor (if not all), never actually execute the trades on behalf of their clients but rather allocate those funds to mutual funds/etfs/SMA/hedge funds/CTAs? Am I correct? What's the best way for me to market myself to independent financial advisors? I was thinking of putting together small presentations and just walking into independent advisors in my area and trying to buy some time so that I can show them my performance etc. and hope that they allocate their funds to me? Given that my AUM is small, I'm only charging incentive fees and zero management fees.

Please take my word for "my performance is great" as I am not selling anything on this forum. I'm just trying to understand the best way to approach this and don't want to waste anyones time trying to explain my performance etc. In short, I turned 10k to about 300k in two years. My worst drawdown was 8.9%. 300k + family friends allocations = 500k in AUM. My returns are negativily correlated with SP500, I trade foreign exchange (80%) and equity futures (20%).

Given that you guys would be my target client, what are your thoughts and advice? What should be the best approach that you'd take if you were in my shoes. I want to grow my AUM.

Thank you in advance.