ONLN is the only ETF that lets investors tap into the explosive growth of online retail by pinpointing retailers that principally sell online—and then zeroing in on its largest, most iconic companies, like Amazon and Alibaba.

A barrier to ESG and SRI adoption is the one-size-fits-all approach inherent in mutual funds and ETFs. But a new solution allows advisors to create SMAs that are customized based on each of your clients’ values, needs and preferences.

Advisor Perspectives will be the exclusive marketing agent for Investments Illustrated’s products, the Big Picture © Chart and App. Advisor Perspectives will offer these products to its audience of nearly a half million professionals in the financial advisory industry.

Technical analysis is built on the idea that markets and securities are actionable through analysis of historical trends. No firm has been as dominant and successful in the field of technical analysis that Dorsey Wright, the 30-year old Virginia-based firm that is now part of Nasdaq.

A white label approach streamlines the ETF launching process, by using filings and approvals that are already in place with the SEC

After the tumult of Q4 2018, investors deserved an easy quarter, and they got it. The Q4 trends of falling rates and rising economic concerns continued. But risk assets, like stocks and non-government fixed income spread products, pulled out of their nose dives with strong performances in Q1 2019. As we look ahead to the remainder of this year, what should bond investors expect?

If there is one asset class where advisors have taken a do-it-yourself approach, it is municipal bonds. Advisors and their clients often buy individual muni bonds and hold them until maturity. But the muni market is very broad, diverse and complex – and those are the ingredients that favor professional management.

Recessionary fears have subsided and all signs are that the global economy has stabilized, albeit at a less-than-desired growth rate. But risks abound – tariffs on Chinese goods that could trigger a trade war, Brexit negotiations, rising oil prices and a possible Fed rate hike.

Ever since the growth of robo advisors began to accelerate nearly a decade ago, the dominant trend facing advisors has been the commoditization of investment advice. With the proliferation of high-quality, low-cost investment solutions, advisors have increasingly outsourced their investing, freeing up valuable resources to help clients in other ways. But that doesn’t mean that all outsourced solutions are created equal or that advisors cannot add value through the investment choices that are made on behalf of their clients. Here’s what advisors need to know when choosing an outsourcing solution.

The most successful advisory firms are building their technology framework around their optimal client and the experience they want to deliver to that client. What’s most important when designing an experience is considering how it adds value to the advisor-client relationship.

Value investors have fared poorly over the last decade, as traditional value indices have trailed their corresponding growth counterparts. But that doesn’t mean that all value funds have done poorly. Indeed, one notable exception has been the Matthews Asia Value Fund (MAVRX).

With equity valuations at elevated levels, subdued economic growth due to changing demographics and stubbornly low productivity gains, as well as a bleak outlook for fixed income, advisors are challenged to rethink foundational portfolio elements of investor portfolios—which means seeking out strategies that bolster the core going forward.

There are three legs to the retirement problem: determining an appropriate savings and spending plan, having the right amount of insurance, and constructing an appropriate portfolio. Achieving those three goals and smoothing consumption, especially during the critical period just before and after retirement, is a complex and computationally intensive undertaking.

• American investors are confronted by accelerating complexity, sub-par returns and minimal coordination between their assets, investment strategies and underlying liabilities. When one considers that millions of investors struggle with the same challenges, you realize that America’s multi-trillion-dollar personal savings market is plagued by systemic inefficiency.

Nearly two million financial plans were created in the last year using MoneyGuidePro. The two individuals who are charged with overseeing the success of the acquisition of PIETech, the parent company of MoneyGuide Pro, discuss what that means for their clients.

As advisors have expanded their suite of financial planning services and sought new ways to add value to their client relationships, they have also committed to solutions to streamline their investment management. One of those solutions is a model portfolio, which consist of allocations to a group of mutual funds that meet the goals and risk tolerances of their clients.

While there are many ways to gain individual exposure to the value, size, quality, momentum and low volatility factors, multifactor strategies combine exposure to all of them. Choosing the right one for client portfolios is incredibly difficult.

The chief investment strategist at one of the world’s largest asset managers provides insight into the six themes that will drive the global economy and capital market returns.

• The traditional role of asset managers has been limited to investment management, which is understandable considering the challenge of consistently delivering superior returns. While many asset managers provide resources and education to advisors, rarely do they make that part of their core mission.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, many individual investors were left questioning the effectiveness of their investment strategies. While many believed their portfolios were well-diversified, as the financial system faltered, they saw a large portion of their investments decline. Investors have grown weary of fund managers who profess to provide excess returns, while gains they realize are diminished by fees. Investors are more keenly focused on portfolio risk and efficient, cost-effective implementation. So given this heightened focus, how can advisors help investors work toward their goals efficiently and effectively?

VSL uses a volatility-driven, short-term capital appreciation model. Dom Catrambone explains how that has made VSL the top performing large-cap ETF in 2019 year-to-date.

It will soon be possible for guests at Marriott hotels in China to bypass lines at the registration desk and check in at a kiosk using facial recognition. Halfway across the globe, Marriott workers are going on strike, seeking higher wages and workplace safety. Artificial intelligence and robotics are at the heart of those highly promising but disruptive innovations. I am speaking today with someone whose index invests in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence companies that are at the heart of those trends.

One billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and this number is likely to grow to nearly 3 billion by 2050. To complicate this problem, 60 percent of the world’s population lives in crowded water basins shared by multiple states — many of whom are failing or are at war with one another. There is a lack of fresh water resources to meet water demand. It affects every continent and was listed in 2015 by the World Economic Forum as the largest global risk in terms of potential impact over the next decade. My guest today invests in solutions to this looming global water crisis.

I speak with Steve Deroian about the future of the partnership between Dimensional and John Hancock, and explore the reasons behind their fee reductions and the new products coming from this relationship.

In the U.S., $12 trillion of investments carry an environmental, social and governance – or ESG – mandate. That is nearly a quarter of all professionally managed assets in the U..S. – and the same percentage of global assets have an ESG mandate. Boston-based Grantham Mayo van Otterloo and its chairman, Jeremy Grantham, are among the leading and most outspoken proponents of ESG investing and related issues.

• Private equity funding is behind many of the big roll-up firms, including High Tower Advisors, Atria Wealth Solutions, Edelman Financial Services and the Carson Group. Most prominently, PE investments fueled Focus Financial Partners, which went public in July of last year. James Poer, the CEO of Kestra Financial, recently partnered with a private equity investor and discusses the role of private equity in wealth management.

With consolidation looming in the ETF industry, who will be the likely winners? Will advisors continue to shift allocation to passive products and will ETFs be the primary recipients of those flow? Two industry experts sort out those issues.

ETFs have become a cornerstone of portfolio construction across the advisory industry. Over the last three decades, they have grown from zero to a $4 trillion market. My guest today is Ed Rosenberg, who will help us understand the key trends in the ETF market and what they mean for advisors.

One of the great paradoxes of the asset management industry is that its focus is on designing products that grow assets, yet that’s often not what investors need. Investors want a to participate in the market’s upside but be protected from downside losses. I’m going to talk today with two people who are at the forefront of a revolution in ETF product design to support the growth-driven needs of investors.

Two of the leading municipal bond asset managers, Invesco and Dimensional Fund Advisors, will present their assessment of the compelling opportunities to add value in the municipal bond market. Attendees will learn key considerations for constructing client muni portfolios and how to address specific client needs. In addition, Advisor Perspectives will present an overview of the results of its recent market research study, which assessed how advisors are choosing municipal bond funds and ETFs.

Learning Objectives:

• How to evaluate municipal bonds in the current rate environment
• What are the critical risk in municipal bond investing
• What is the appropriate client asset allocation for municipal bonds

Making sense of the complex global economic environment is essential for advisors, at least for the very important reason of being able to intelligently answer their clients’ questions. Today, the greatest uncertainties are in Fed policy, China and Brexit. We hear from Gene Tannuzzo, whose job it is to make sense of those issues for advisors and their clients.

Beginning with the launch of SPY over 26 years ago, the ETF industry has dramatically reduced the cost of investing for countless advisors and their clients. I will hear from Sue Thompson of State Street Global Advisors about the competitive pressures in the ETF industry.
She oversees the distribution of the SPDR ETFs, which have over $620 billion in assets. She discussed what State Street is doing to ensure the SPDR product line is priced competitively.

A compelling feature that draws investors to ETFs is “thematic investing.” We’ll discuss how it allows investors to target companies that are poised to benefit from structural shifts in technology, people, demographics and infrastructure development.

As a financial advisor, your website is an important part of your brand message. Are you screwing it up?

Join me and Dan Solin for this 30-minute free webinar about how to do it right, from the message to the content and media.

On February 19, 2019, listeners will learn:

• What the empirical evidence says attracts people to advisors and what they are looking for vs. what advisors believe clients are looking for
• Why it is so hard to come across as competent and warm, friendly, and relatable at the same time
• What all this means for advisors websites – what the true goal of a website should be
• How to visually organize your website – graphics, photos, and imagery
• The false perception that advisors have that they have to project perfection and be all-knowing.
• What your website should say and what its message should be
• How to create relatable content for your website
• Why people are not interested in other people; they care about themselves.
• How to get people to say “tell me more about that” when they visit your website.
• How to get your content to stay with people after they leave your site.
• How to create videos for your website that will engage the reader and come across as authentic
• The value of humor and how to use it on your website.

Register today!

According to research from Cerulli, nearly half of advisors use a model portfolio to manage $2.7 trillion in assets. We’ll discuss how those models are permeating all aspects of investment management in the financial advisory industry.

Robo advisors suffer from a common flaw, according to Zvi Bodie. They don’t use a “safety first” methodology and are exposing users to unnecessary risks.

2018 may have been the toughest year for investors insofar as federal regulations are concerned. That goes back to when the SEC began reviewing conduct standards in 1995. We’ll look at what changed in the fiduciary landscape in 2018 and the outlook for 2019.

The chief goal of society should be to maximize wealth, according to Tyler Cowen. Pursuing that goal has delivered everything from nutritious and abundant food to air conditioning and smartphones in the developed world, and those benefits are spreading rapidly to the developing world. We’ll look at whether Cowen’s single-minded focus on growth make sense and what it means for investors.

One of the most remarkable developments in the financial markets over the last 25 years is that the number of publicly traded companies has declined by half. We’ll look at the reasons for that decline and what it means for investors.

We're very pleased to invite you to join us for Portfolio Construction Forum Markets Summit 2019 (February 19) and Finology Summit 2019 (February 20-21), in Sydney, Australia.

A large-scale survey of financial advisors has contradicted many of the long-held beliefs about ESG/SRI investing.

Millennials make up the largest percentage of our population today, yet have seen some of the lowest labor force participation growth and highest unemployment out of all age groups since the turn of the century. This has larger implications when coupled with slow wage growth, high home prices, and mounting student debt.

In July of 2015, CNN Money featured an article with the optimistic and intriguing title "More American teens are getting jobs. That's good for everyone." After reading the article, we revised one of our monthly charts on Labor Force Participation to include the age 16-19 cohort -- one we elsewhere combine with the 20-24 year-olds. We've updated this article to include the latest employment data.

The fact that millennials are the next generation of wealth is well-documented. What remains to be explored, however, is how advisors can best design their practices to communicate with Millennials as clients. Using the right words is an important part of reaching this population. Advisor language has typically been dry, impersonal, and full of cliché and jargon. This has to change if advisors want to retain assets and succeed with intergenerational wealth transfer within their books of business. If not, fee compression and roboadvisors pose a very large competitive threat.

This seminar will teach advisors what they need to know about how to communicate effectively with Generation Y. It will cover:

• The buzzwords that been commonly used in the past but won’t work with Millennial clients and should be avoided.
• Terms and phrases that Millennials are more open to hearing, and that advisors should integrate into their communications with clients
• The tone and voice that advisors should use when communicating with Millennials
• What body language, office design, and choice of apparel (tie or no tie?) say that words never could
• Client follow up strategies using digital communication that will be more effective than ones of the past

90% of women, at some point in their lives, will have the responsibility of managing their own personal finances. As advisors, how well do we understand our women clientele and how prepared are we to serve them? In this webinar we take a broad look at what our female clients and prospects value in an advisory relationship. As well as challenges that women specifically face and how we can solve for them with thoughtful planning.

The purpose of this webinar about fighting elder financial abuse is to improve your understanding of diminished capacity so you can take steps to prevent abuse when you see these signs. Older people with diminished capacity are at greater risk. In the webinar, you will learn to recognize the seven warning signs of financial abuse. You will learn how you can form an action plan in your office that so you can take protective action for your clients who appear to be at risk. This is about prevention, not waiting until there is abuse and then trying to figure out how to keep it from getting worse. You will also get an update about requirements to report abuse and protections for you in the new regulations.

The big economic number tomorrow will be the Q2 Third Estimate for GDP. The last two quarters are behind us with their real annualized rates of 2.9% in Q4 2017 and 2.3% in Q1. What do economists see in their collective crystal ball for Q2 Third Estimate? Let's take a look at the latest GDP forecasts from the latest Wall Street Journal survey of economists conducted earlier this month.

Social podcasting is one of the fastest growing forms of communication. Top advisors are leveraging this platform into a powerful competitive advantage. Stop wasting time and money on prospecting and marketing that doesn't work. This social communication strategy is one of the most incredible financial advisor marketing tools ever. It’s a must-have advisor marketing tool and in this webinar, we'll show you how to implement social podcasting into your practice. You will also learn:
To take back the spotlight by creating your own thought leadership.The importance of offering engaging content to your clients.Why social media is the key to growing your practiceHow improving your social communication strategy can provide increased opportunities for referrals.
Matt Halloran will answer attendees’ questions during the webinar and will be available to continue the discussion on APViewpoint.

This is the second in a multi-part series where we examine pundits' opinions and predictions on the latest topics.