Advisors’ reluctance to rely on changes in home office models to guide their portfolio allocation decisions is reflected in other investment strategy decisions they make. For instance, only 13% of advisors offer homeoffice asset allocation models to clients with little modification. However, more than a third (36%) report using that information as the basis of their own allocation models. In line with these findings, half of advisors (52%) report minimal to no influence of home office models on their asset allocation decisions. Moreover, advisors report that an average of just 37% of total assets are influenced by the home office research team. Advisors do not expect the value of this research to change over the next two years.
The manager selection process reflects similar attitudes among advisors. Only 13% use home-office research extensively to choose fund managers and 36% use home-office information as the basis for their own selection process. More than half of advisors (52%) indicate they make manager selections on their own or with limited input from the home office.