If you’re an advisor and looking to generate more leads for your business, a strong website is a must. Its where potential clients can find you. Susan Theder, chief marketing, and experience officer at FMG Suite recently laid out the five most important pages every advisor website must have in an article for Financial Advisor Magazine. According to Theder, the most important page is the Home page. It gives people their first impression of you and should answer the following questions: Who do you serve, what problems do you solve, and what’s your visitor’s next step? Another must-have page is the About Us page as it’s the “place they go to meet you virtually.” But it shouldn’t look like a resume. Instead, it should include your story, why and how you got into the business, and information about your support staff. Next is the Services page, where you can list your service offerings, but you should write it from the client’s perspective. Include the challenges they are likely facing and outline how you will solve them. The fourth page is the Blog page, where you can share content to demonstrate your expertise. The fifth and final must-have page is the FAQ Page, where users can find answers to the most common questions a potential client may have.

Finsum:In a recent article for Financial Advisor Magazine, Susan Theder of FMG Suite laid out the top five pages an advisor website must have, including a home page, an about us page, a services page, a blog page, and an FAQ page.

Orion Advisor Solutions recently unveiled significant enhancements to its technology during the opening session of the firm’s flagship Ascent conference. Founder and CEO Eric Clarke addressed an audience of 1,600 advisors and revealed the firm’s new Story Paths advisor-facing technology for its Orion Custom Indexing solution. The new technology will allow advisors to easily select from one of several user paths which allows the advisor to customize portfolios or tax transition legacy assets within a handful of steps and minutes. The announcement comes as consumer demand for more personalized services has increased with assets in direct indexed SMAs ballooning to $362 billion. Orion’s Custom Indexing solution, which was launched in 2018, allows registered investment advisors to differentiate their offering with personalized, professionally managed, low-cost portfolios. Clarke stated, “While other direct indexing solutions cater almost exclusively to wirehouse advisors, we set out to build a solution with a heavy emphasis on customization that meets the needs of the independent advisor.” The new Story Paths workflow enables advisors to create truly custom portfolios at scale, whether they’re aiming to track a traditional index, replicate a factor-tilted exposure, or overlay to an existing internal or third-party separately managed account. In addition, the new technology will streamline the portfolio customization and tax transition process to a matter of minutes compared to the industry normal of multiple days.

Finsum:Orion recently unveiled new enhancements to its direct indexing technology that will allow independent advisors to create truly custom portfolios at scale within minutes.

Investors have continued to pile into ESG funds amid a strong political backlash and new regulations, but what impact does ESG have on expected returns? In their book, Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing, Larry Swedroe, and Sam Adams presented the answer to that question from research that included studies from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. They found that in both U.S. and international markets, ESG strategies’ returns were well explained by their exposures to the Fama-French factors of market, size, profitability, investment, momentum, and value; and multifactor alphas were not significantly different from zero. This indicates that any benefit from incorporating ESG strategies into a portfolio is already captured by other well-defined and known equity factors, meaning investors could not improve their Sharpe ratios by using ESG strategies. They also found that return and risk differences of ESG funds could be significant and were mainly driven by fund-specific criteria rather than by a homogeneous ESG factor. In addition, across four fund categories including index, active, exclusion-based, and non-exclusion based, the majority of observations displayed higher volatility than the broader market. Swedroe and Adams also noted that environmental and social scores did not contribute to performance. However, if investors want to have their cake and eat it too, then they should tilt their portfolios to sustainable firms with exposure to the Fama-French factors of size, investment, profitability, value, and momentum.

Finsum:In their book, Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing, Larry Swedroe, and Sam Adams presented evidence that ESG strategies don’t provide any return benefit unless they’re tilted to Fama-French factors of market, size, profitability, investment, and momentum.