Advisor Perspectives

Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, have recently released Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. The authors identify the four key “villains” of poor decision making and offer their four step WRAP process for making better choices.

1. Widen Your Options

2. Reality-Test Your Assumptions

3. Attain Distance Before Deciding

4. Prepare to Be Wrong

Carl and Dan will discuss the Heath brothers specific ideas on setting up “tripwires” to prevent us and our clients from doing dumb things with money while overcoming narrow framing and overconfidence in our financial decision making. Like a low fuel warning in a car a “tripwire” snaps us out of autopilot, grabbing our attention at exactly the right moment to reconsider a decision or to make a new one.

Building investment portfolios is the cornerstone of the service that advisors offer their clients. Sound portfolio construction creates lasting value for investors and enables a thriving advisory practice. In the upcoming webinar, Built to Last, Shundrawn A . Thomas, Global Head of Northern Trust FlexShares ETFs, will discuss the fundamentals of portfolio construction, highlighting related strategies for advisors to consider as part of their own efforts to build portfolios for the long-term.

We don't know when interest rates will rise, by how much or how fast, but your clients may need portfolio solutions to diversify their exposure for any rate environment.

Our experts will discuss:
- What's next for fixed income markets
- Alternative Fixed Income trading strategies
- Which strategies perform well in various market
environments
- How to allocate to alternative fixed income solutions

In a volatile market where every basis point counts, research indicates that 68% of advisors are feeling pressure to revise their asset management strategies, 68% are using more alternative investments, and many are turning to tactical strategies to manage risk and achieve positive performance.

Learn how two leading money managers leverage tactical strategies to manage risk without sacrificing returns to taxes. Our experts will address how they achieve greater diversification and enhance risk management, and the benefits of using a tax-advantaged account such as a flat-fee VA to improve tax efficiency

Cohen & Steers’ Head of Fixed Income Bill Scapell will discuss:

• Why preferred securities may be an attractive income generator for your clients

• The strong relative value preferred securities have in today’s fixed income markets

• How strengthening bank balance sheets continue to be a catalyst for performance

• The access we have as an institutional manager to the institutional (OTC) market which has provided better income and total return opportunities

June 7, 2012, the Federal Reserve released its long-awaited Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPR) on bank capital requirements. The effect of those will be:

• Traditional DRD/QDI-eligible Preferred stock would be eligible Tier 1 Capital;
• Trust preferred securities (TruPS) would not be eligible;
• Banks would maintain higher levels of common equity to support preferred and debt holders; and
• Banks have begun and will continue to refinance their outstanding TruPS with traditional tax-advantaged preferred stock.

Hear from the longest tenured preferred manager in the industry, Flaherty & Crumrine about what opportunities this may hold for you and your clients in the new year.

Practice

Interest rates are historically low today and risk-free assets are harder to find, making sovereign bonds an increasingly risky and complex asset class. Fixed-income investors who tie their strategies to benchmarks may have benefited as rates have fallen, but they may not realize the unintended consequences they face.

Almost all bond indices are market-cap weighted, so companies or governments that issue the most debt—perhaps hurting their creditworthiness—make up the biggest share of the index. Index characteristics can also change over time, so a benchmark that seemed appropriate before may look quite different today. Question: does it still align with their portfolio objectives?

There are other ways to run a bond strategy without the constraints of benchmarks like the Barclays Capital US Aggregate or Global Aggregate. Join our webinar on November 14th to discuss how financial advisors can identify the objective of their clients’ fixed-income allocations and consider alternatives to traditional benchmarks.

We will present the latest quantitative and qualitative insights into key trends in investment management outsourcing and financial advisors’ opinions.

All registrants will be emailed a copy of the full research report prior to the webinar on October 3.

You’ll hear:
Highlights of Northern Trust’s “Investment Management Outsourcing: The State of the Art In 2012” research based on a recent survey of more than 500 Advisor Perspectives subscribers. This work updates research conducted in 2010 and tracks changes in advisors’ views toward and use of outsourcing in the last two years.

In light of years of monetary and fiscal stimuli, many believe the economy may be predisposed to inflationary pressures. In this webinar we will discuss how an allocation to commodities can hedge a portfolio from inflation as well as look at which asset classes have performed well in rising, falling and stable inflationary environments. We will also discuss why treasury-inflation protected securities (TIPS) may not be a suitable hedge against inflation.