What is Architect?
Architect is iCapital’s new portfolio construction tool that empowers advisors to design portfolios with alternatives and structured investments. Advisors can use Architect to easily analyze and integrate alternatives and structured investments into client portfolios to create potentially better investment outcomes.
Why should I use Architect?
Architect is a real-time scratchpad to explore new asset allocations and build portfolios that incorporate alternatives and structured investments from your unique iCapital product menu.
How can Architect help me grow my business?
You have the potential to strengthen investment expertise in the alternatives and structured investments space by including Architect’s advanced analytics as part of your essential toolkit. This could help you improve client conversations, build more sophisticated portfolios, and set yourself apart from the competition.
Which assets can be evaluated using Architect?
Architect supports traditional investments, including equity, fixed income, ETFs, and mutual funds, but extends beyond these asset classes and products to include alternatives (such as private equity, private credit, hedge funds, private real estate funds), and structured investments.
What type of analytics can I access with Architect?
Architect’s advanced analytics and compelling visualizations allow you to evaluate the impact of adding alternatives or structured investments from the iCapital product menu. With Architect, you can compare scenarios and simulate historical performance; use factors to identify macroeconomic portfolio return drivers; and evaluate the “fit” between the portfolio and the client’s objectives, using Spectrum Target and Alignment Scores.
How is Architect different from other portfolio analytical tools?
Unlike other portfolio analytics tools, Architect is built from the ground up to help advisors manage portfolios that include alternatives and structured investments. Architect helps advisors understand the impact of adding these assets to portfolios.
Why is it important to have a tool that analyzes alternatives and structured investments?
Forward thinking advisors know that alternatives and structured investments can play a key role in client portfolios. Architect enables advisors with a framework that works across the entire portfolio.
What are Spectrum Scores and why do they matter?
Spectrum dimension scores enable advisors to evaluate an investment’s impact on a portfolio’s:
- Protection — ability to protect an investor from downside;
- Upside — opportunity for returns;
- Liquidity — ability to easily convert assets into cash;
- Simplicity — an analysis on the simplicity or complexity of the asset’s structure, features, and the investment strategies;
- History — an evaluation of how much time series data we have on the assets in the portfolio.
This framework empowers advisors to evaluate portfolios relative to client preferences and produce an alignment score – a measurement of goodness of portfolio fit. This approach is more nuanced and all-encompassing than competitive approaches, which typically seek to match a client risk tolerance based on just risk and return.
How do I start analyzing portfolios?
You can either import a portfolio, copy and paste holdings, or upload a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet.
