Posts Tagged ‘Contributor’

Increased Value with Technical Overlays on Internal Research

Tuesday, October 30th, 2012

by Brian Liv­ingston, SIA Charts

In mid Octo­ber, Bob Simp­son, Pres­i­dent of Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sul­tants and a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to Advi­sor Ana­lyst, pub­lished an arti­cle enti­tled “Learn to Ride The Win­ners and Avoid The Losers”.

This arti­cle is a follow-up to Bob’s arti­cle to give you addi­tional infor­ma­tion about how advi­sors across North Amer­ica are using SIACharts to improve their invest­ment process and help clients to achieve their goals through enhanced invest­ment performance.

Regard­less of what com­pany you work for, in all like­li­hood you receive inter­nal research from your firm.  Some advi­sors use this inter­nal research exclu­sively while oth­ers may ques­tion the rela­tion­ship their com­pany has with the rec­om­men­da­tions they are inter­nally get­ting. Some advi­sors don’t trust their inter­nal research at all, choos­ing instead to go with an unbi­ased third party tool for their invest­ment deci­sion mak­ing. Nor­mally this research is based on fun­da­men­tal cri­te­ria: P/E ratios, earn­ings esti­mates, etc.  What is usu­ally lack­ing from this analy­sis is the tech­ni­cal side of things.  Although some advi­sors look at tech­ni­cal analy­sis as some form of voodoo, when tak­ing fun­da­men­tal analy­sis and then com­bin­ing it with tech­ni­cal analy­sis, you can really get the best of both worlds.

I want to high­light two ways advi­sors are using tech­ni­cal analy­sis to over­lay with their fun­da­men­tal research. First, you can com­bine tech­ni­cal analy­sis with fun­da­men­tals by doing a rel­a­tive strength analy­sis on the fun­da­men­tal choices to help nar­row down your invest­ment selec­tion to see which hold­ings are strong in both worlds. Sec­ond, you can com­pare any two indi­vid­ual hold­ings against each other to see who the clear win­ner is.

SIACharts works with pro­fes­sional advi­sors right across North Amer­ica, and they spe­cial­ize in tech­ni­cal analy­sis on a rel­a­tive strength basis.

Using their sys­tem, we can take your firm’sin-house fun­da­men­tal rank­ings and then get SIACharts to do their tech­ni­cal over­lay for us.  The end result gives us a sec­ond list that we can now use as a com­par­i­son rank­ing tool against the fundamentals.

What advi­sors can then do is cross ref­er­ence against the two lists to find what is appear­ing at the top of both.  This process focuses our buy­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and gives a straight-forward process to use for the tim­ing of the buy/sell of these hold­ings, which is where tech­ni­cal analy­sis excels. This helps to min­i­mize the num­ber of choices for your con­sid­er­a­tion and has helped to min­i­mize risk and increase performance.

Con­sider the top chart to be the fun­da­men­tal rank­ing of a list of rec­om­mended stocks by your firm.  The sec­ond list is the rel­a­tive strength rank­ing done by SIACharts.  You can see that there are 5 posi­tions in the top 10 of both lists, which helps to guide you to get­ting into posi­tions that are both ranked fun­da­men­tally and tech­ni­cally strong.

Also, you can com­pare two fun­da­men­tally strong hold­ings you are look­ing between whether they be two stocks, ETFs, Indexes, or Mutual Funds for a more macro-oriented overview (like IVV vs. AGG) or for more micro-oriented com­par­isons (like AAPL vs. DELL).  For either the indi­vid­ual com­par­i­son or for your group of hold­ings you have ranked, you can alterthe per­cent­age of the indi­vid­ual chart­ing com­par­isons, thereby effec­tively alter­ing the time­frame that you may be look­ing at​.By low­er­ing the per­cent­age, we can be more aggres­sive in your trading/investing style and by increas­ing the per­cent­age we min­i­mize trans­ac­tions and are in posi­tions for a longer period of time.

This chart above is show­ing that U.S. Equi­ties are cur­rently out­per­form­ing U.S. Bonds on a 2% com­par­i­son chart.

SIACharts has been advis­ing invest­ment advi­sors across North Amer­ica for the last six years help­ing to min­i­mize over­all risk and nar­row down your invest­ment selec­tions to find out­per­for­mance. Using their pro­pri­etary rel­a­tive strength rank­ing sys­tem, SIACharts has been very suc­cess­ful in giv­ing invest­ment pro­fes­sion­als a unique and pow­er­ful tool to sim­plify your invest­ment prac­tice. They have worked suc­cess­fully with the major banks and invest­ment com­pa­nies across Canada pro­vid­ing these tech­ni­cal over­lays for users sub­scribed to them for their indi­vid­ual firm research reports.

By being able to keep advi­sors in the strongest choices SIACharts has been able to min­i­mize the risk asso­ci­ated with invest­ment selec­tion, get­ting advi­sors out of stocks like Research in Motion and Yel­low Media before they crashed, and just as impor­tantly keep­ing clients out stocks like Man­ulife and Shop­pers Drug Mart.

Some advi­sors swear by using just fun­da­men­tal research and other advi­sors swear by using tech­ni­cal research, but there is grow­ing num­ber of advi­sors who are actively learn­ing to marry the best of both of these worlds with great results for both them­selves and their clients.

Intro­duc­tion Webi­nar to SIACharts​.com

SIACharts is Canada’s largest and most suc­cess­ful tech­ni­cal analy­sis advi­sory web­site. We actively help advi­sors across North Amer­ica bet­ter man­age their client’s port­fo­lios through risk man­age­ment, invest­ment selec­tion, port­fo­lio man­age­ment, and asset class rota­tion strategies.

This webi­nar will be an overview of the invest­ment tools and strate­gies that SIACharts pro­vides for their clients includ­ing asset allo­ca­tion, SIA’s rel­a­tive strength sys­tem in our reports, and port­fo­lio cus­tomiza­tion. After the overview, we will allow time for ques­tions and answers on any part of the web­site. We expect this call to be 30 to 40 min­utes but have allowed time of up to 1 hour.

Reg­is­ter for a ses­sion now by click­ing a date below:

Thu, Nov 1, 2012 4:00 PM — 5:00 PM EDT
Tue, Nov 6, 2012 2:00 PM — 3:00 PM EST
Fri, Nov 9, 2012 12:00 PM — 1:00 PM EST

Once reg­is­tered you will receive an email con­firm­ing your reg­is­tra­tion
with infor­ma­tion you need to join the Webinar.

Sys­tem Require­ments
PC-based atten­dees
Required: Win­dows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server
Mac®-based atten­dees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.5 or newer

Mobile atten­dees
Required: iPhone®, iPad®, Android™ phone or Android tablet

You can also sign up for a free 14-day trial by click­ing on the link below:
www​.siacharts​.com

Copy­right © SIA Charts


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How One Advisor’s Online Presence Yields Three Clients a Month

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

 

I’ve had sev­eral emails in response to last Thursday’s arti­cle on how investors are using LinkedIn to help select advi­sors. A com­mon theme is the extent to which advi­sors are frus­trated by head office restric­tions on their abil­ity to use vehi­cles like LinkedIn; some­thing which I sus­pect will change over time.

Today, the focus shifts to how one advi­sor is cap­i­tal­iz­ing on his online pres­ence to attract an aver­age of three new clients per month. This has taken place in three steps:

  1. Build­ing online aware­ness and dri­ving traf­fic to his site
  2. Invit­ing vis­i­tors to his site to sit in on a monthly webi­nar, typ­i­cally on a week­night or Sat­ur­day morning
  3. Fol­low­ing up with investors who sign on for the webinar

Build­ing online awareness:

The first step for this advi­sor was to become com­fort­able with the online world. Begin­ning about eight years ago, he spent sev­eral hours a week online vis­it­ing dif­fer­ent sites. He com­mented and expressed opin­ions on things that he read, addressed mis­con­cep­tions, pro­vided clar­i­fi­ca­tion where there was con­fu­sion and answered questions.

In 2007, this advi­sor was approached by the author of one of Canada’s top finan­cial blogs, who had read some of his com­ments. The advi­sor was invited to become a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to this blog.

A cou­ple of things hap­pened. First, with repeated expo­sure, his vis­i­bil­ity on the blog increased. And sec­ond, he started to get read­ers of his com­ments on the blog vis­it­ing the advisor’s site to learn more.

Trans­lat­ing traf­fic to engagement:

It’s nice to get traf­fic to your site, but that traf­fic is of lit­tle value if there’s no way to engage visitors.

One solu­tion is to encour­age vis­i­tors to your site to sign up to receive your online com­men­taries and other communication.

Or you can do what this advi­sor did: On his site, he invites vis­i­tors to sign up for a free monthly webi­nar, last­ing for one hour and held on a week­night or Sat­ur­day morn­ing. This webi­nar is purely edu­ca­tional in nature, pro­vid­ing advice on high level finan­cial plan­ning issues and get­ting into specifics on com­mon behav­ioural mis­takes by investors.

He’ll nor­mally have 10 to 15 prospects sign on for a webi­nar. There are two big advan­tages to webi­nars; from the advisor’s per­spec­tive, it allows him to take on clients across Canada, pro­vided that he’s reg­is­tered in their province. More impor­tant, from the investor’s point of view, sign­ing on for a webi­nar from home is much more con­ve­nient and much less threat­en­ing than meet­ing with an advi­sor in per­son or attend­ing a seminar.

Con­vert­ing prospects to clients:

While the webi­nar is tak­ing place, prospects get an email with a two part form. The first part asks for feed­back on the webi­nar; the sec­ond invites prospects to request a tele­phone call to explore the pos­si­bil­ity of work­ing together.

About 70% of peo­ple who attend the webi­nar request that call so any­where from seven to ten prospects take that next step. Dur­ing that call, one of the mem­bers of this advisor’s team tries to get a sense of whether there is a pos­si­ble fit. For exam­ple, this advi­sor requires all new clients to go through devel­op­ment of a finan­cial plan with him and one of the two plan­ners he has on staff.

He also lim­its his prac­tice to clients who com­mit to invest­ing all of their long term invest­ments with him; given that the online space fea­tures many do-it-yourself investors, that’s a deal breaker for some investors (although investors who are truly self-directed will gen­er­ally screen them­selves out before they get to the phone call.) Ulti­mately, about half of the prospects who request a phone call become clients, yield­ing three to five new clients monthly.

Being an advi­sor gives you scope to exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent approaches to com­mu­ni­cat­ing with both exist­ing and prospec­tive clients. This advisor’s approach won’t be a fit for most advi­sors, but con­sider whether you can apply some lessons from his suc­cess in engag­ing prospects who visit his site to your business.


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Three Steps to Effective To-do Lists

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

For the past few years I’ve been a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to Hors­es­mouth, the lead­ing online prac­tice man­age­ment resource for US finan­cial advi­sors. Recently, the site fea­tured an arti­cle by U.S. con­sul­tant Robert Mid­dle­ton out­lin­ing three sim­ple steps to mak­ing to-do lists more effective.

The arti­cle is reprinted below.

To see more of Robert Middleton’s work and get a free copy of his report on attract­ing high net worth clients, click here:

http://​action​plan​.com/​h​ome

And click here for a free 45 day trail to Horsesmouth:

http://​www​.hors​es​mouth​.com/​p​u​b​l​i​c​/​f​r​e​e​t​r​i​a​l​/​f​t​j​o​i​n​.​a​spx

By Robert Middleton

Stressed out by the daily con­tem­pla­tion of all you have to do? Get out from under in three smart steps and you’ll soon see order form­ing from the chaos.

It’s vital to learn about and under­stand the prin­ci­ples of mar­ket­ing and the strate­gies and processes used to imple­ment them effectively.

But I call that “The Easy Part.”

The hard part is imple­ment­ing what you already know. And there seem to be 1,000 things con­spir­ing to pre­vent us from putting our knowl­edge into action.

One of the biggest hur­dles is sim­ply man­ag­ing projects and time. There is a sim­ple but pow­er­ful sys­tem that really works to keep on top of and move for­ward with the zil­lion things you have on your plate.

I hate to lead with the neg­a­tive, but…here we go. A few things you’re prob­a­bly doing wrong:

You have a huge list of things to do and you look at it daily. Or per­haps it’s got­ten so over­whelm­ing you don’t look at it at all.
You don’t have a weekly plan for things you are com­mit­ted to doing this week no mat­ter what.
Your daily to-do list, if you have one, is way too long and is not inte­grated into your daily schedule.

I’ll give you solu­tions to all of these prob­lems, but the first thing to remem­ber is that you don’t have to work insanely hard to get a lot done. I’m some­one who gets a lot done, but I don’t go crazy get­ting it all done, and I rarely feel overwhelmed.

The big key is pri­or­i­ties. That is, you want to be work­ing on big things that move your busi­ness for­ward. Not a lot of things, but the few things that really matter.

So that brings us to…

Solu­tion #1: Tam­ing your big list

A big list is a list of all the things you have to, want to, and need to do. The prob­lem with a big list is that it’s usu­ally only one list. Big mis­take. That big list makes you feel over­whelmed. Every time you look at your big list, you freak out because of all the stuff it con­tains. You have so much to do!

The thing is you don’t. You can only do what you can do today, and not every­thing on that big list is for today. So look­ing at it every day is a for­mula for los­ing the game of get­ting impor­tant things done.

Instead, restruc­ture your big list into a whole bunch of project lists. Mar­ket­ing projects, client projects, admin projects, any kind of project. You can file those project pages in some kind of online sys­tem, or do what I do; put them in a good, old-fashioned binder.

When do you look at your project lists? Once a week and only once a week. Never, ever, every sin­gle day.

Solu­tion #2: Choos­ing your weekly list

Very few peo­ple form a weekly list, but you must if you want to get con­trol of things once and for all.

Once a week, on Fri­day after­noon, over the week­end, or first thing Mon­day morn­ing, you leisurely page through your var­i­ous project lists. Slow down. Yes, delib­er­ately take the pace down a notchto pre­vent over­whelm. (This may seem coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but when you slow down, you will feel that you have more time to get things done.)

Now, as you notice an item that needs to be done this week or that you really want to get done this week, you write that item in your weekly list.

There’s one restric­tion; you may choose only 10 items per week. These are not things you’d like to get done. These are things you are com­mit­ted to get­ting done. You’re going to plan for them and fin­ish them. That’s your pro­duc­tiv­ity game for the week.

As you go through this process week by week, you may dis­cover you need to put a few less or a few more items on that weekly list to fill your time. You will develop a keener sense of what you can real­is­ti­cally accom­plish in one week. Remem­ber, the game is to list only items you really intend to get done. No more, no less.

Solu­tion #3: Cherry-picking for your daily list

Your daily list or as I like to call it, my Daily Con­trol Panel. You can struc­ture it any way you like, but here’s what I do: I use a two-column, full-page daily plan­ner with my appoint­ments for the day on the left and my daily to-dos on the right.

Each morn­ing I open my plan­ner, look at my appoint­ments, and then take a look at my weekly list and ask myself what I can rea­son­ably fit in for today. If I have lots of appoint­ments, I can do less; if fewer appoint­ments, I can do more.

Then my pro­duc­tiv­ity game is to accom­plish every­thing on that list that day. Do I always suc­ceed? No, but I get it done most of the time. With only 10 pri­or­ity items listed for the week, I have only two to four items to com­plete every day.

This is calm­ing! It means that I’m not scan­ning a list of 100 things every day, get­ting over­whelmed, and just doing things fran­ti­cally to get them off list (or worse, freez­ing up under the pres­sure). That just stresses you out, and you never really feel pro­duc­tive because you’re “just doing things.” You don’t come away with a sense of focused accomplishment.

Instead, I’m mov­ing things for­ward slowly and surely, step by step. That way, all the big things I want to accom­plish get done. And the lit­tle things (like answer­ing email) fit in between the cracks, instead of con­sum­ing the whole day.

Bot­tom line: Don’t under­es­ti­mate the forces con­spir­ing to dis­tract you from impor­tant projects and tasks. Make it a pri­or­ity to get orga­nized and cre­ate a work­able sys­tem for plan­ning and time man­age­ment. It might be the most pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing activ­ity you do this year.

To see more of Robert Middleton’s work and get a free copy of his report on attract­ing high net worth clients, click here:

http://​action​plan​.com/​h​ome

And click here for a free 45 day trail to Horsesmouth:

http://​www​.hors​es​mouth​.com/​p​u​b​l​i​c​/​f​r​e​e​t​r​i​a​l​/​f​t​j​o​i​n​.​a​spx


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From One Generation to the Next

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

The fol­low­ing is based on one of Norm Trainor’s clients, Norm Carroll.

I first met Norm Car­roll in May, 2002. I was launch­ing our Prac­tice Devel­op­ment Pro­gram spon­sored by Great West Life. Norm was one of 32 President’s Coun­cil qual­i­fiers who signed up for the pro­gram. In our ini­tial inter­view, Norm explained that his pri­mary moti­va­tion was to keep his pro­duc­tion level in the top ten of the President’s Coun­cil. Like most top advi­sors, Norm is very com­pet­i­tive. How­ever, main­tain­ing a top ten posi­tion was becom­ing more dif­fi­cult. Norm was the only pro­ducer in his office. The chal­lenge of sell­ing, man­ag­ing staff and run­ning his busi­ness was becom­ing overwhelming.

As Norm would tell you, it took a while in the Covenant pro­gram to grasp the com­plex­i­ties of build­ing his busi­ness. After a num­ber of years, it all came together. Norm learned how to work more effec­tively with his employ­ees. This led to increased pro­duc­tion that allowed him to hire another pro­ducer. By free­ing him­self up to do what he does best, the busi­ness just took off. As he learned to bet­ter man­age him­self and his busi­ness, he was freed up to focus on what was really important.

A new and more pow­er­ful pur­pose emerged in his work and busi­ness. His son, Neil, came into the busi­ness and suc­ces­sion became the focus. Prior to Neil join­ing, Norm had restruc­tured the prac­tice. Ini­tially, Norm had a spe­cial­ist and two assis­tants. One of the assis­tants wanted to get into sales. Over the last few years, she has become an impor­tant con­trib­u­tor to the growth of the busi­ness. This gave Norm expe­ri­ence in man­ag­ing a pro­ducer and pre­pared him to work with his son. Norm wanted Neil to suc­ceed on his own merit. Neil started on com­mis­sion and has con­tributed from day one to the prof­itabil­ity of the firm.

When a son or daugh­ter enters the busi­ness, there is an over­whelm­ing sense of pride. It val­i­dates your work and your life. Neil learned at the din­ing room table about the busi­ness. When Neil joined, it was a state­ment that he saw the value of what Norm was doing.

Norm has built a strong team that sup­ports and chal­lenges each other to grow. They feed off each other. The involve­ment of oth­ers has breathed new life into the busi­ness. The com­bi­na­tion of diverse lev­els of expe­ri­ence has taken the busi­ness to new lev­els. It is allow­ing every­one in the busi­ness to visu­al­ize a much big­ger future. It is an excit­ing place to work.

The firm now has a Busi­ness Plan to tran­si­tion the com­pany to the next gen­er­a­tion. Norm has moved from suc­cess to sig­nif­i­cance in his work and to suc­ces­sion in his business.

Norm Trainor is the founder of The Covenant Group, a com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in prac­tice devel­op­ment for advi­sors. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, visit his Web site at www​.covenant​group​.com.

Fol­low The Covenant Group at:


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The Advisor Your Clients Crave

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Stephen Wershing’s pre­sen­ta­tion asks some very impor­tant ques­tions for advi­sors to con­tem­plate. Great ques­tions lead to great answers, and the last posi­tion you want to find your­self in, is with a prospec­tive client sit­ting in front of you, think­ing to them­selves, “So what?” or worse say­ing it out loud. The objec­tive of your client com­mu­ni­ca­tions should be to rein­force to your clients the “Why did I become your client?”, and to keep the “What have you done for me lately?” answers fresh.

Make a point of scan­ning through the pre­sen­ta­tion for the ques­tions. If you hover your pointer over “more,” you can full-screen the viewer.

The Advi­sor Your Clients Crave on Prezi

Stephen Wer­sh­ing, CFP® coaches finan­cial advi­sors to be more effec­tive and suc­cess­ful, and attract more clients and refer­rals, by devel­op­ing more client-connected and client-driven prac­tices. His process of col­lect­ing sys­tem­atic and objec­tive client feed­back and using it to reori­ent an advisor’s prac­tice effec­tively engages an advisor’s best clients to drive the strate­gic plan of the busi­ness. He con­sults finan­cial prac­ti­tion­ers on many prac­tice man­age­ment issues, includ­ing strate­gic dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, client advi­sory boards, and imple­ment­ing tech­nol­ogy. Read more from the author/contributor here.

Source: Stephen Wer­sh­ing, The Client Dri­ven Practice


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Insulating clients from media frenzy

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Despite the recent improve­ment in mar­kets, client anx­i­ety con­tin­ues at very high lev­els. Among the things fuel­ing that anx­i­ety are the drop in port­fo­lios since last fall, volatil­ity and con­tin­ued uncer­tainty about prospects for the economy.

Another impor­tant con­trib­u­tor to anx­i­ety is media cov­er­age that some­times fea­tures alarmist head­lines and takes tough news and exag­ger­ates it.

In the face of that, it can be a chal­lenge for advi­sors to help keep clients calm and with their per­spec­tive intact. One thing that can help is pro­vid­ing clients with his­tor­i­cal par­al­lels, such as was fea­tured in a col­umn in the Globe and Mail.

–Adver­tise­ment–

Advi­sors who sent this col­umn to clients report a gen­er­ally pos­i­tive response. Using a num­ber of exam­ples from the recent past, the col­umn  employs the anal­ogy of the swing­ing of a pen­du­lum to describe sen­ti­ment and fea­tures the quote “the pen­du­lum never stops in the middle” .

To read the col­umn, go to The art of ignor­ing the pendulum’s swing.”


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