A simple SMA analytics tool for financial advisers

Zephyr Associates Inc., probably best known to financial advisers for its StyleAdvisor and AllocationAdvisor products, is now providing a free peek at separately managed accounts performance analytics. Advisers who work with SMAs, or who are involved in their selection, already have quite a few places to turn to for analytics information. A handful of big names would include tools from Lipper (part of Thomson Reuters), Morningstar Inc. and Standard & Poor's, among others. This tool is meant to be used as a desktop calculator to make a quick check on an SMA. Sure, from a marketing perspective it seems meant to whet the adviser's appetite for Zephyr's far more sophisticated and comprehensive products. According to Brandi Meeks, team leader for marketing and client administration at Zephyr, some of the larger, more well-known contributors to the Zephyr SMA database include AllianceBernstein, Allianz Global Investors, BlackRock Investments, Calamos Asset Management Inc., Fred Alger Co., John Hancock Funds, Polen Capital Management and Robeco Investment Management. The Zephyr tool was built in HTML 5 so that it can be very interactive on the page without relying on other technology such as Flash or JavaScript. In the upper-left corner of their home page (styleadvisor.com) visitors will find an orange “Try Zephyr Analytics” arrow. Just to the right of this is a “search for an SMA” box where an adviser can start typing the name that will bring up a pre-populated list. The company is considering adding a drop-down menu of the database offerings to make things a bit simpler for SMA neophytes for a future update. You can also adjust the benchmarks and time range by clicking on the “settings” tab to the left. Once you have completed these, just hit the magnifying glass search button and up opens a separate page in a few seconds. This will then generate about a dozen boxes containing charts (parameters, performance, cumulative excess returns, allocation, “managers versus universe: returns”), fact sheets, product information and metrics (R-squared and information ratio). E-mail Davis D. Janowski at djanowki@investmentnews.com.