Did you know that most advisors spend 5.5 hours per week handling investment management related tasks like searching for funds? That stat comes from Kitces.com and does a good job highlighting what has become an increasingly difficult problem for advisors: how to find the right funds when there is an ever-increasing ocean of options, including many that look very similar. Between screeners with limited criteria (I want “value ESG”, not just “value”) and the pain of cross-asset class searches, finding funds has increasingly become a real quagmire for time and effort. Imagine if you could have three extra hours per week to focus on new client acquisition instead of cycling through drop-down menus trying to find funds? Well, a company called Magnifi has a great new tool to help you do just that. For example, international stocks are getting some attention from Wall Street analysts right now because of their favorable valuations versus US stocks. However, finding the right international funds is even harder than doing so for domestic stocks. For example, you might want to find the best ETFs focused on Asia. Because of the antiquated architecture of existing fund screeners, it would take hours of work to pin down funds in the right fee range and with the right composition. Instead, Magnifi uses natural language search to immediately display and compare all the relevant funds for your query. For example, here are the results for searching “China Value Funds”.

Another great thing about Magnifi is that they incorporate FI360’s fiduciary risk score for every fund, allowing you to incorporate that element for clients and rest easy with concern to regulations.

FINSUM: In our view, Magnifi is the best way to search and filter investments, period. Once you try it out you will quickly move on from the many ETF “screeners” available.