Skip to content

Six ways investment advisors can win big with integrated rebalancing and order management

In today’s turbulent financial landscape, investment advisors and asset managers find themselves in a high-stakes game where lightning-fast decision-making across a multitude of client portfolios is the name of the game. Market turbulence and economic ambiguity have cranked up the complexity meter, demanding swift and savvy action like never before.

To establish the best trading strategy for addressing risk, urgency and market conditions, order execution must be well integrated with portfolio monitoring, pre-trade compliance, rebalancing, and trading. When rebalancing and directed trading are natively integrated with an order management system (OMS), you can manage orders for multiple custodians, set up trade approvals, leverage FIX for straight-thru processing, and trade away to achieve best execution.

Here, we explore six ways seamlessly integrated rebalancing and order management can give advisors an edge in growth and profitability, operational efficiencies throughout the investment management process, and better results for their clients.

  • Streamlined workflows and best execution

Achieving efficient operations – encompassing tasks like trade approvals, trade-away processes, order configurations, block trading, allocations, real-time position updates, and the capability to rebalance with up-to-the-minute data – requires an integrated environment. When rebalancing and order management converge onto one platform, you get a centralized trading foundation with optimized workflows for review sets, trade blotters, and order archives. This combination can significantly elevate an advisor’s responsiveness when addressing portfolio deviations or compliance checks.

  • Straight-thru processing

A multi-custodial rebalancing platform with straight-thru order execution via FIX provides a simplified operational and compliance workflow, better efficiency, and improved accuracy. FIX connectivity ensures seamless access to hundreds of brokers and other sell-side firms via a broker-neutral financial network sell-side firms. In addition, direct interfaces with various brokers’ proprietary trading algorithms and strategies and live order status notifications can help amplify trading and operational efficiencies.

  • Targeted, directed trading made simple

A platform that integrates rebalancing and order management makes it simple to do targeted, directed trading. Add positions, adjust them as you see fit, and close or replace them across accounts or households. When target generation and tax-aware rebalancing capabilities separate order generation and order management, advisors have more control and a more robust ability to abide by client constraints and preferences.

  • Improved trade reconciliation

An integrated rebalancing, trading, and order management solution should reconcile the prior day’s orders against the transactions received from the custodian or portfolio reporting system to identify missing trades, quantity errors, and pricing variances. You should be able to instantly and visually view reconciliation errors and document the resolution decisions while maintaining a compliant framework for trade operations.

  • Full-lifecycle trade and order management

A seamless trade lifecycle is essential for efficient and accurate order fulfillment and operations – from starting an order and reviewing, approving, and sending it for execution to confirmations and affirmations, trade reconciliation, and post-trade compliance. Easily document trade decisions on a per-trade or per-review-set basis and permanently archive all trades created on the rebalancing platform.

And if you’re trading away or involved in other complicated trading scenarios, connecting to DTCC’s Central Trade Machine (CTM) automated transaction matching and trade confirmation platform ensures an efficient matching process outside your firm’s custodian. After executing blocks in the rebalancing platform, simply create and send your allocations to custodians, and run the trade reconciliation process for proactive correction and place the orders in an archive the next day.

  • Flexible, scalable trading operations

Achieving greater ease of use, flexibility, and scalability across trading operations is critical to increasing growth and service quality. Trade blotters and customized workspaces give your traders the tools to create and manage placements of block trades and gain complete visibility of execution status.

Integrated trading execution and OMS connectivity are also crucial for complex rebalancing requirements. Advisors should be able to review and approve orders quickly while providing support across all asset types and sophisticated workflows.

The vital role of integrated platforms in today’s dynamic markets

In times like these, harnessing the power of a single integrated platform for portfolio rebalancing and order management is your best tool to trade efficiently and deliver the best execution. Speed and accuracy are crucial as advisors shift investment strategies to meet changing client needs and more frequently utilize tactical rebalancing, tax-loss harvesting, and incremental portfolio adjustments to protect their clients’ interests.

Integrated rebalancing and order management give today’s advisors what they need to readily accessible information and make the right moves – quickly and at scale. From trade approval and trade-aways to order sets and block trading and allocations, investment advisors can transform their entire trade lifecycles to streamline complex rebalancing and achieve the best execution in volatile markets.