Envestnet rides boom in model portfolios
Brooks Friederich is a little-known figure in the world of investment advisory, even among the Wall Street cognoscenti. Yet every year, the 39-year old — and his Berwyn, Pennsylvania-based employer Envestnet — helps steer billions of dollars into tailor-made strategies for financial advisers, part of what’s known as the model portfolio boom.
By providing a platform that offers around 2,000 customized products from some 150 asset managers, Envestnet is tapping into rising demand from retirement accounts and the like for bespoke portfolios — combining stocks, Treasuries, credit and more. As such, Friederich is becoming an intermediary in a multitrillion-dollar business opportunity for titans such as BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group.
Founded in 1999, Envestnet now serves some 100,000 advisers and has overseen a total of $300 billion in model-portfolio trades. That’s giving Friederich an insight into the allocation decisions of investors with big money at stake. And right now, he says, they’re getting cautious about some of the year’s biggest stock winners as valuations soar.
“End clients are saying, ‘I want an investment product that isn’t going to have all this exposure to the big-tech stocks,’” said Friederich, principal director of research strategy at Envestnet. “If you look at retirement portfolios, they all have too much exposure to that because of the construction of the market.”
Mega-cap U.S. technology companies are among the best-performing equities this year thanks to a frenzy for anything linked to artificial intelligence and perceptions that interest rates — seen as a threat to growth stocks — have peaked.
Meanwhile BlackRock recently projected that the model portfolio realm could grow to a $10 trillion
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