This month Advisor Perspectives marks four years of publication, and I’d like to share with you some of our accomplishments over the last year and our goals for the future.
Our mission is to provide financial advisors timely and actionable insights, and I’m proud that we have published a number of articles over the last year reviewing new investment products. In particular, we have looked at a variety of mutual funds and annuities, with the goal of assessing their appropriateness for retirement-oriented investors, either in their accumulation or de-accumulation stage. Some products we’ve liked and others we haven’t, but our approach has always been to offer an independent and objective analysis. This week’s issue contains an example of one such review: Fantasy-world Returns for Equity Indexed Annuities.
We have also reviewed a number of books written for the advisory audience. While we can only review a small fraction of those that are published, we try to select those that are provocative and insightful. The financial crisis continues to be a topic of keen interest among our readers, and I’m especially pleased that we have been able to review many of the most popular books on its causes.
Conference coverage has been another focus. We attend many major conferences, but we focus on those that have high-profile speakers and are not widely attended by advisors. Recent examples were the CFA annual investment conference in Scotland and the Altegris/John Mauldin conference in San Diego. At those conferences, we report on the sessions whose topics are of greatest interest to our readers.
Responding to the interests of our readers is a major priority. We closely monitor the readership of all articles and commentaries, and this information guides our article selection and editorial focus. We continually introduce new topics, but we also cycle back to areas of keen interest among our readers. We welcome and encourage feedback from our readers, and we are always glad to hear which articles you’ve enjoyed and which you haven’t.
Our ongoing efforts to provide the most relevant content have allowed us to grow our readership significantly. Our web site attracts nearly 50,000 unique visitors per month and, according to the third-party traffic measurement service Quantcast, among advisor-oriented sites only Investment News attracts more visitors.
Our market commentary service has contributed significantly to the growth of our audience, and at the beginning of this year we introduced the Venerated Voices™ awards to recognize the submissions that drew the greatest readership over the course of the preceding year. We identified the individuals and firms that submitted the most widely read commentaries, and we announced an update to those rankings at the end of the first quarter. The next Venerated Voices™ awards will be issued at the end of the year.
