Are You Capitalizing On Growing ESG-investing Popularity
What is ESG? Trendy, but Who Cares? Advisors are Missing the ESG Market. How Do Advisors Attract ESG Clients? We all can become complacent in our work at times. As daily tasks pile up, we spend our working days simply addressing the next appointment or putting out small fires as they appear. Yet, this...Read More
Case Study: How to take Prospecting to a New Level with Larkspur Executive’s Custom Trackable Marketing Letters (CTML)
Here at Larkspur-RiXtrema, we understand retirement plan advisors. Over 10K plan advisors use our software, which is about a quarter of all plan advisors in the country. We understand how busy you are and the challenges with getting a response from plan sponsors in growing your practice. When it comes to plan improvement, the plan...Read More
Case Study: Understanding Risk Capacity
Oftentimes, an investor may be especially averse to risk on an emotional level, but their need to take more risk in order to reach investment goals may be lost on them. Advisors need a way to reconcile this concept to their clients. How do you make a client understand this relationship between risk and return in a constructive way?
Inverted Yield Curves Revisited
I wrote about yield curve inversions back in November 2018. At the time the US yield curve was flattening, but resisting inversion. By the most common measure of inversion, the yield on the 10-year Treasury minus the yield on the 2-year Treasury (10-2). The graph below shows the 10-2 spread prior to the last recession...Read More
How Target Date Defaults Affect Equity Allocation Exposure
Money market funds used to be common default investments for 401k plans. More recently, it is becoming more common for target date funds to be the default investment of choice. While it might make more sense to use a TDF as a default, How Target Date Defaults Affect Equity Allocation Exposure takes an interesting look at the unintended consequences.
Winning 401k Business Nearby with Planisphere
Luckily, Planisphere is equipped with a very handy search engine, which will provide you a lot of flexibility in your searches and prospecting.
More Lawsuits Mean Even More Problems for Stubborn Plan Sponsors
Excessive fee lawsuits now are a common occurrence throughout the financial industry. Every week you can hear about a major university or company pension plan being sued by the participants. However, the one thing that keeps on surprising us is the stubbornness of the plan sponsors to understand during the committee meetings that their duty of loyalty is to the employees, not to the company.
Using The Client-View To Manage Portfolios In Portfolio Crash Test Pro
The new ability to add clients is most simply thought of as a way to organize your portfolios. It is for combining all of the client’s portfolios with their questionnaire results. The advantage of being able to add clients, rather than just having a long list of portfolios, is that it makes naming portfolios and...Read More
Podcast:Retirement Plans Are Wasting $12.32B in Fees: How Are Your Clients & Prospects Doing?
Summary: Massive study by Larkspur-RiXtrema uncovers deficiencies and shows opportunities. On this podcast you will find out about this historic study. We undertook first of a kind research study by looking at 52,529 qualified plan lineups. Using quantitative methods, we distinguished true active funds vs. ‘closet indexers’. Turns out that majority of funds held by...Read More
WHY SHOULD YOU BE A 3(21) OR A 3(38) FIDUCIARY?
One of the biggest incentives for plan sponsors to seek a fiduciary to assist with their retirement plan is to share the burden of providing sound advice to all participants enrolled in the plan. Since 2009, shortly before the Department of Labor started requiring providers to more clearly disclose their fees via the 408(b)(2) rule,...Read More