Helios, a quantitative asset management firm that provides an outsourced chief investment officer service to advisors, has launched a new feature that allows advisors to customize the frequency of their quantitative models rebalancing. Advisors will now be able to schedule rebalances, within parameters, of their chosen models, according to the company.
William Trout, director of wealth management for Javelin Strategy and Research, said the ability to time rebalancing to the situation and profile of the individual investor enables the incorporation of new asset classes into the portfolio mix. In addition, he said the improved ability to understand and manage risk exposure will allow increased personalization. This also supports transparency and other gains in reporting. Trout said this is “imperative” given the increased prominence of factors, including inflation, in driving returns and “the economic, religious and ideological polarization that defines our world today.”
Chris Shuba, Helios founder and CEO, said one of the points of contention for advisors who want to drive excess returns or reduce risk is how much work it takes.
“The more that you trade, the better your results will be in the long run,” he said. “That’s a problem because a lot of advisors want scale. They want efficiency. They don’t want to be trading all the time.”
Shuba said their system has defaults as to when models would be rebalanced, but advisors can, with the enhancements, adjust that depending upon their preferences.
Before this latest update, Shuba said the rebalancing schedule rate was whatever an advisor had chosen among the platform's default, whether biweekly, monthly, quarterly or annually. Now, advisors can “create the desired level of operational efficiency.”
The new features rely on no external third-party rebalancing technology as the Helios platform has been built from scratch in-house, said Shuba.
In July, Helios launched new sleeving capabilities, giving advisors the ability to customize the firm’s model portfolios to reflect their or their clients’ personal preferences. Helios builds its portfolios as model “types,” so the sleeving capability allows advisors to group these models within a portfolio as they see fit. Advisors using Helios now can selectively enable or disable sleeves in their models depending on their preference.