Rebalancing software, one of the most important tools for financial advisors, helps advisors retain clients’ asset allocation and protect them from undesirable risks. In addition to simply automation, rebalancing software provides portfolio management, trading, tax-loss harvesting, compliance management, reporting, and many more options.
In our previous article, we outlined seven of the most frequently used rebalancing and trading tools. Today, we look at another seven popular rebalancing and trading software tools.
RedBlack
RedBlack provides an investment management solution for rebalancing and trading. The solution is dynamic, adaptable, and scalable; it automates advisors’ workflows for monitoring, rebalancing, pre-trade compliance, trading, order management, and post-trade compliance. Automating the rebalancing process and timely execution of trades results in improved portfolio performance and more efficient and profitable business practice.
RedBlack provides the following functionalities:
- Modeling — Creating different types of models to implement advisors’ investment management strategies. Blended models improve maintainability and allow sleeve rebalancing.
- Accounts and households — Rebalancing at the account or household level, individual portfolios, portfolio groups, or globally.
- Tax-sensitive rebalancing — Rebalancing of households using the industry’s most sophisticated location optimizer. Creating unlimited rule sets and rules at the household, account, and asset classification levels and for cash.
- Held-away account — Incorporating held-away accounts, including 401(k)s, 403(b)s, and variable annuities.
- Rebalancing actions — Rebalancing portfolios in full, individual positions, and sleeves in a blended model as well as investing cash or raising cash.
- Directed trading — Changing position sizes, adjusting, closing, and replacing positions across accounts or households.
- Multiple security types, including equities, ETFs, mutual funds, individual bonds, unit trusts, SMAs, and Limited Partnerships.
- Using equivalents to manage legacy positions, mutual fund share classes, and preferred securities.
To meet advisors’ needs, RedBlack provides seamless integrations with Advent, AssetBook, Orion Advisor Services, Pershing, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, and many more. In addition, RedBlack has certified interfaces with portfolio management systems, trust accounting systems, order management systems, custodial data import and order export interfaces, brokers, market data feeds, equity algorithmic trading, and more.
LifeYield
LifeYield helps forward-thinking financial firms, advisors, and investors make and keep more money. Their Taxificient Score lets financial advisors quantify and improve investor outcomes. In February 2020, LifeYield integrated with AdvisorPeak to build a tax-smart rebalancing platform that provides advisors with a seamless, household-level view and allows them to achieve maximum tax efficiency for their clients.
LifeYield is also integrated with Black Diamond and Envestnet | Tamarac to use their household-level reporting and rebalancing features. Custodian integrations include TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab. More integrations can be found here.
“Morningstar’s study, as well as independent analyses done by Ernst & Young, suggest we can improve investor outcomes by showing advisors how to manage the full household portfolio to improve asset growth, rebalancing, and the optimal sequence of withdrawals across all the accounts in the household.” —Jack Sharry, EVP, CMO at LifeYield
Read the research on LifeYield on WealthTech Club.
CircleBlack
CircleBlack is a WealthTech platform that provides advisors with a 360-degree view. Besides rebalancing and trading, the platform offers performance reporting, billing, and model marketplace.
CircleBlack is integrated with the following custodians: Fidelity Institutional & NFS, First Clearing, Folio Institutional, Interactive Brokers, RBC CAS, Schwab Institutional, SEI Wealth Platform (SWP), TD Ameritrade, Trust Company of America, and others.
“In everything we do, our goal is to leverage and seamlessly integrate best-in-class technology . . . allowing advisors to focus on serving clients rather than managing different technology applications.” —John Michel, CircleBlack CEO
Read the research on CircleBlack on WealthTech Club.
BlazePortfolio
BlazePortfolio provides financial advisors with portfolio rebalancing and trading technology. The platform offers the following features:
- Model rebalancing to manage multiple strategies, mix and match sleeves, apply models to a single account or client household, analyze portfolio drift, and create customized rules to manage one-off scenarios.
- Trade order management to manage sophisticated order flow across more than 600 custodians, brokers, and execution systems as well as multiple asset and security classes.
- Tax management to achieve Simple Tax Alpha with tax harvesting and location optimization and reviewing long- and short-term gains or losses on every trade.
- Cash management to analyze, monitor, and trade based on the cash requirements of each advisor and client.
- Risk management to ensure trading compliance and data accuracy and to prevent incorrect trading.
BlazePortfolio has built more than 50 integrations to portfolio accounting systems, custodians, trading networks, execution systems and brokers, market data providers, trust accounting systems, and other third parties.
“So, our focus is everything necessary to monitor portfolios on that daily basis for asset-allocation drifts. Create any orders that are necessary for either investment strategy changes or daily cash-management responsibilities. And also the order management, which [involves] connectivity to all the different custodians and brokers. We have real-time fix connectivity for electronic trading and allocations.” —Bryson Pouw, Founder and CEO of BlazePortfolio
Read the research on BlazePortfolio on WealthTech Club.
Oranj
Oranj provides advisors with end-to-end technology designed to help them run better businesses and deliver a world-class experience to their customers. The platform includes a robust but easy-to-use rebalancing and trading tool. Advisors can simplify the day-to-day management of investing and seamlessly trade securities across multiple custodians using straight-through order processing with a variety of customizations.
Oranj provides two options for tax-loss harvesting: to maximize losses and to offset year-to-date gains. With Oranj, advisors can monitor and manage an entire household’s financial picture and provide holistic advice for the aggregate household.
Advisors can trade in two ways: export a file to a custodian or provide direct FIX trading (available only for firms eligible for FIX trading).
Read the research on Oranj on WealthTech Club.
FIX Flyer
FIX Flyer develops advanced technology for managing complex, multi-asset, institutional securities trading using highly scalable software and network technologies. FIX Flyer automates the trade life cycle with Co-Pilot, its order management system, and Flyer Trading Network, a multi-asset trading network.
FIX Flyer has integrations with Orion Advisor Tech, Envestnet | Tamarac, Riskalyze, Morningstar, TradePMR, and more.
Capitect
Capitect offers modern performance reporting, client billing, and rebalancing tailored for advisors’ needs. Advisors can build a custom portfolio visually for each client using their own investment strategies.
The list of core features includes the following:
- Performance reporting
- Client fee billing
- Client and advisor portal
- Account aggregation
- Document sharing
- Goal tracking
- Custom asset class trees
- Personalized portfolios
- Flexible rebalancing
- Block trading
Capitect is partnered with the following third parties:
- Custodians — Schwab Advisor Services, Shareholders Service Group, TD Ameritrade Institutional
- CRM systems — Redtail Technology, Salesforce
- Financial planning tools — IncomeConductor, Envestnet MoneyGuidePro, RightCapital
- Portfolio analytics — Kwanti, Morningstar Advisor Workstation, Riskalyze
- Industry groups — Alliance of Comprehensive Planners (ACP), XY Planning Network (XYPN)
“We don’t see ourselves as a one-stop shop to get everything an advisor would need from start to finish. We just want to fill a few holes; where advisors can use our solution to fill those steps along the process, and they can continue to use the other technologies and tools they love and keep the custodian they’re currently happy with.” —Edwin Choi, Cofounder and CEO of Capitect
Read the research on Capitect on WealthTech Club.
Bottom line
Rebalancing and trading software allows advisors to take a more personalized approach to the investment services they provide. Most software enables advisors to build their individual strategies and rules for rebalancing and trading. To be helpful for advisors, software should allow them to handle manifold aspects of rebalancing and be easy to use simultaneously.