New Firm = New Opportunities. Fidelity’s brokerage platform rivals major competitor when it comes to ImpactInvestors.
After many hours of research this past quarter, we’ve determined that Fidelity’s brokerage platform for professional advisors, National Financial Services (NFS), stacks up well against one of its major competitors when it comes to the availability of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds that they offer with No Transaction Fee (NTF)… sorry for the acronyms!
Keeping in mind that each of these clearing firms works with numerous Broker Dealers, each of which may have their own set of NTF funds available to them, here are the steps we took to come to our conclusion:
First, we identified three funds being held currently in model SRI portfolios from Pershing, that rank in the bottom half of their peer group based on Fi360’s 3-year overall score (a weighted scoring methodology).
Next, we looked up all of the SRI funds listed on SIF’s website and cross-checked to find which ones are available as NTF funds on NFS’s platform, which is a whopping list of 2,773 funds.
From those lists, we identified 41 funds that are both SIF and NTF funds available at NFS.
We then went through all the remaining NTF funds and identified four more that we qualified as SRI even though they are not listed on SIF’s website, giving us 45 funds to work with in our ImpactInvestors Managed Mutual Fund Portfolios.
Lastly, we entered all of these 45 funds into Fi360’s analyzing software to compare them with the Pershing model portfolio. We discovered that, not only do we have access to all but one of the Pershing model SRI portfolio funds with No Transaction Fees, but by making a few changes to the lineup using funds we now have access to at NFS, we can significantly improve the overall portfolio!
The bottom line is, ImpactInvestors will see a drop in the weighted average internal fund expenses, in some cases by more than 10%, along with an improved overall portfolio ranking. It is our goal that these changes will translate into real returns for investors in future quarters and we will be actively engaged in managing the portfolios with an ongoing effort to capture those returns in a sustainable and responsible manner.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions, thoughts, or suggestions!
INFO@THEIMPACTINVESTORS.COM
