"Definitely. I want to transfer the other accounts over to you."
That's something we love to hear. It shows trust, communication, and the desire to continue a long-lasting relationship. Frankly, we hear that all the time from our advisors when they present Nitrogen to their clients and prospects. It's not some formula or magic, it's simply showing the investor how they're invested, across their entire portfolio. Getting a holistic view of your clients' portfolios, including accounts outside your discretion, is a crucial step in promoting risk alignment and setting proper expectations.
Discovering Held Away Assets
Here are three core methods advisors use to find held away assets:
The Risk Number
In the questionnaire, investors are asked to enter their entire investable amount. Why? Because to find their true Risk Number and how much they're really willing to risk, they need to be thinking about all their assets. Here's another way to think about it: if you had five million dollars, but I asked you how much risk you could handle on your $100,000 account, what do you think your answer would be?
Portfolio Tools
When walking through the portfolio in a meeting, you and your client will pour over the analysis and really come to grips with the risk involved. We've found that our presentational risk analysis tools often prompt many clients to ask their advisor to show them those same metrics for their other accounts. When you get this question in a client or prospect meeting, make sure you're up to date on our Portfolio Analysis tools and check out our account aggregation solution (Syncing in outside accounts via Asset Sync) for a quick way to import those held away accounts.
Retirement Maps and Timeline
Retirement Maps and Timeline represent a simple and highly interactive way for you and your clients to bring risk capacity and long term goals into the risk alignment picture. Our visuals-centric presentation just naturally gets clients excited about their future. Clients want their probability of success to be as accurate as possible, so when their success looks low in Retirement Maps, clients are quick to bring upheld away accounts that would raise that probability of success.
Discussing Held Away Assets
Once those held away assets have been captured, Nitrogen portfolios do a great job of facilitating a conversation that seamlessly pivots between that holistic picture and a more focused one - centering around the impact those held away accounts have on a portfolio.
You can quickly illustrate the impact of any group of accounts by muting them. Muting an account or a group of accounts will remove them from considerations in aggregated portfolio metrics like the Risk Number, Potential Annual Return, Expense Ratio, and Annual Dividend.
Pro Tip: The accounts menu located directly under the portfolio name will allow you to select the accounts you'd like to represent in portfolio metrics, but you can also mute individual accounts quickly by simply dragging them to the muted area or selecting the "Mute Account" option in the 3-dot menu on each account.
Muting accounts under your management, reviewing the metrics of any held away accounts, and then unmuting your accounts is a quick way to highlight the value you're bringing to the table, as well as the need for changes in those held away account strategies.
You can also use our mute account functionality to illustrate the room a particular client may have for more aggressive investment approaches. For a client with low-risk held away accounts, and a personal Risk Number in the mid-50s for instance, investment accounts in the 70s or 80s can be entirely appropriate, and bring their total portfolio into alignment with their stated risk tolerance.