Portfolio management and athletics have a lot in common; the first step is all-important.

Take football, for instance, the first step off the line of scrimmage can be the difference between a wide receiver running past a defensive back and catching a game-winning touchdown, or being shut down and taken out of the play.

For asset managers, the first step is also critical—especially when it comes to the trading process. In short, the first step has to be right. Always.

If data isn’t accurate or if your trading system is slow, you can miss an opportunity. In a fast moving market, accurate and efficient tools are imperative to provide good performance and value to your clients.

If you’re an asset manager, your investment strategy is unique to you and your methods. You have to be confident that whatever technology you’re using to handle your trading operations can adapt to your clients’ unique investment needs. Flexible technology can make all the difference to ensure that the first step is always right.

In phase one of this series, we’ll cover some of the common problems that asset managers face during trade creation, and how Co-Pilot, Flyer’s portfolio management and trade order management tools, can help execute investment strategies faster.

Problems Faced by Asset Managers in Trading

The experience with trade creation tools is oftentimes too complex and not intuitive. While you, as an asset manager, know what action you want to take when it comes down to selecting the right security for the moment in a given portfolio, it’s an unfortunate truth that technology can get in the way.

Technology needs to support you in making rapid decisions, not slow you down.

Problem 1: Challenges Managing Portfolios at Scale

Many portfolio management and trading systems offer a cookie cutter approach to trade construction. When you have high-net-worth clients who demand individual attention to their portfolios, cookie cutter doesn’t cut it.

But that reality makes managing portfolios at scale difficult, and repetitive tasks become a burden to efficiently doing your job.

Problem 2: Ongoing Portfolio Management is Time-Consuming

In the day-to-day, ongoing maintenance that must be done to keep clients in line with their goals is time-consuming. Some firms try to address these time management issues with rebalancing, but if you’re an asset manager serving clients with complex investment goals, you can’t simply batch their portfolios into a mass rebalance and call it a day.

Instead, you spend your days reviewing drift reports to see where clients may be overweight in certain asset classes or sectors. And sometimes, you might decide that being overweight is okay. Asset management is as much an intellectual activity as it is a mathematical one.

The question you have to ask yourself is this:

“Is the technology I’m using to support my investment decisions helping me do my job faster, more effectively and with more confidence? Or does it get in the way?”

If you feel like your current system gets in the way more than it should, you don’t have to give up hope and stay with a cookie cutter solution. There’s another, better way.

How Flyer Co-Pilot Enhances Trade Creation

When you need to make a decision and act on it, you want speed, flexibility and accuracy on your side. Flyer’s Co-Pilot serves as your agile portfolio management and trading tool so your technology enhances your process, instead of impeding it.

Here are just a few examples of how Co-Pilot can help unlock efficiency during trade creation:

You may view a “flows report” from the custodian to determine if some accounts received a deposit, and with Co-Pilot, you can set automatic triggers to tell you when there is available cash to spend in accounts.  If you want to get out of a security across the board and either buy something else, or leave it in cash, and decide later where to put that cash to work, ‘tactical trade creation’ can handle these situations and more with just a few clicks. Whether it’s from the view of positions, models, cash, account conditions or other factors, Co-Pilot is built to be as flexible as your workflows dictate.

With all these needs covered, Co-Pilot automates much of the repetitive busy work asset managers find themselves running up against in their day-to-day tasks. Once you create and send your trade orders, we take care of the rest. There are no files to generate, download or upload. With Co-Pilot, you get to focus on your clients and what’s happening in the marketing instead of battling your technology and creating workarounds for the process you want to live by.

You can analyze, construct, route trades, and communicate post-trade allocations to counterparties efficiently. That’s the type of work environment that asset managers deserve. After all, getting a better jump off the line of scrimmage will improve your chances of scoring a touchdown for your clients.

Ready to take Co-Pilot for a test drive? Schedule a discovery call to see it in action. 

Learn more about the trade lifecycle