Welcome to “The Summit,” the official First Ascent blog.
If you’re looking for ways to build your practice, investment insights, or advice on how to communicate more effectively with clients and potential clients, then you’ve come to the right place.
You Can Act Like a Fiduciary Regardless of What the Law Says
Reg BI has now been birthed and with it a maelstrom of emotion and controversy. Fiduciary advocates are wearing black and flying their flags at half-mast. They see Reg BI as a sell-out of the individual investors the SEC was created to protect and a knife in the back of the fiduciary RIA community. There … Read More
The Challenge of Being Independent – And What to Do About It
I get to sit in one of the best seats in our profession. My job is to support the financial advisors who decide to work with First Ascent. What that “support” looks like varies widely, from coaching on how to explain our portfolios to clients, to answering nitty gritty questions, to acting as a sounding … Read More
A New Series of Portfolios to Give You More Options
On April 1st (no fooling) we launched a new series of portfolios—the Factor Select portfolios. We created them in response to advisors who wanted our best ideas about how to build low cost, factor-based portfolios. A lot of work and research went into their design and we proudly offer them to give you more options … Read More
TAMP Users: Watch Out for This Fiduciary Landmine
TAMP users beware! There is a disturbing trend in our industry that may get you in trouble with the regulators if you’re not careful. Everything Was Fine Until… It all started innocently enough. In the “early days” (early 1990s) there weren’t many TAMPs, and their investment offerings were quite different. Advisors chose which TAMP they … Read More
Given the market activity we have experienced recently, we thought it would be a good opportunity to share our views and hopefully provide a little useful perspective and insight. In short, we really view this as a natural and probably necessary pullback in the markets. Through September 30th, US stocks were up more than 17% … Read More
Two Newly Embraced Ideas, Thanks to First Ascent
Recently, a financial planner I really admire invited me to a group she was hosting at her office for women in financial services to elevate each other in their respective roles. After I gladly accepted the invitation, she emailed me again saying that the speaker for this month’s get-together had a last-minute conflict and could … Read More
Building Your Own Piece of the Future – Client Profiling
“You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone for the times they are a changin’.” –Bob Dylan Last time we talked about how technology is changing the game for advisors. To sum up, in the future, the traditional cornerstones of your value proposition like investment management, portfolio rebalancing, tax loss harvesting, and financial … Read More
“No man is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.” – Julius Caesar The idea of investing for the long-term sounds easy in theory. However, it can be a difficult concept for clients to internalize when they are in the heart of a volatile market. “This too shall pass” may be true, … Read More
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