Oil prices rose closed higher on Monday to cap off big January, in fact it was the largest monthly gain in the last year. West Texas Crude rose to $88.15 a barrel and the sixth straight weekly gain. Fueling the rising prices are the rising tensions on the border of Ukraine and Russia which seem on the brink of war. Sure, OPEC has supposedly ramped up production by 400,000 barrels a day since August, and however, they have once again underperformed in output in January. While the continued on paper output is expected to be approved in the upcoming meeting the fact is the supply is not moving the needle.

FINSUM: The factors pushing oil prices higher are here to stay, and most likely not all priced in, it could be a big bull market for traditional energy in H1 2022.

Macro factors are flummoxing the bond market and a combination of rising inflation and higher interest rate forecasts are crushing bottom lines. However, now is a great time to consider the future tax bill. Rarely can investors see the future, but the Fed is being about as explicit as possible about hiking rates multiple times this year. This means as yields creep up, bond prices will fall in various segments of the bond market. This is an opportune time to consider cutting ties with bonds and realizing the losses you have because it will be over a month before investors will want to jump back in and they can harvest the losses for the end of the year. FINSUM: Most investors have been looking to active funds and shorter duration to minimize inflation risk, but tax-loss harvesting is a nice way to take advantage of rising yields.

CEO Ron Kruszewski made waves when he announced the $1 trillion goal for client AUM for the wealth division at Stifel. Growing existing clients and recruiting are going to be two main goals as to how Kruszewski outlined how they plan to get there. Currently, the 2,300 brokers at Stifel manage less than half of their trillion-dollar target. Recruiting has been a critical part of their current growth growing by almost a quarter in the previous year, but competitors like Raymond James had almost four times the broker headcount when it crossed the $1 trillion AUM mark.

FINSUM: Recruiting shapes how a company drives revenue as higher-end recruits, making many stories, have wealthier clientele.

Model Portfolios got some widespread skepticism thrown their direction when a group of academics wrote a paper criticizing their usage. The points centered around conflicts of interests and the fee structure. However, model portfolios are templates for investing and so their optimization might not be the ‘perfect’ formula for everyone. Additionally, of course funds are going to include their own products in model portfolios (even if they have higher fees), because they believe their products are superior. In fact, funds would be violating their fiduciary duty if they didn’t honestly think their own ETF was a better product at a slightly higher fee structure.

FINSUM: Cherry picking better-performing portfolios after the fact is an unfair advantage; many model portfolios have different risk factors.

Companies Newfound Research and Simplify Asset management are partnering on a selection of new model portfolios that are giving investors more options on their equity holdings. The structured alpha portfolios are designed to target different growth offerings and provide different risk exposure. With the four portfolios coming in 20/80, 40/60, 60/40, and 80/20 equity allocations investors will have exposure to equity, rate, and volatility markets to mitigate financial risk. Fund advisors are trying to get outperformance from strategic capital efficiency rather than trying to pick winning stocks at the right time.

FINSUM: Even basic equity/bond allocation strategies in model portfolios are a good way for advisors to drill down the risk in a portfolio.