As parents (myself included) apprehensively sent their kids back into the classroom for another pandemic-influenced school year, it put me in the mood to chip away at my own reading list, a collection of research papers that had accumulated in the “to read” folder on my desktop.

Now, before you condemn me to the nerd-set, I’m only going to cover one in this blog, and specifically one that covers a topic that’s relevant for advisors and their clients: how to best protect against inflation.

There’s a perception that all advisors offer the exact same service (or, for that matter, all asset managers, plumbers, architects, etc.). Changing perception for your practice requires building a reputation, a brand, a marketing program.

Toward that end, our firm hosted a webinar earlier this year with our friends at MCo Advisors, a consulting and outsourced marketing department for financial advisors. It was a lively event that generated a spirted Q&A, and I think the video responses to several of the questions will be of interest to advisors who weren’t able to attend the live event (most are under 2 minutes).

“Good Ideas Can’t Be Scheduled” is the title of a 2019 blog post by Morgan Housel of Collaborative Fund. His point was that deadlines shouldn’t be placed on good ideas, regardless of field, but the execution of good ideas is the opposite.

One of Blueprint’s best “good ideas” presented itself just like that – unscheduled – at a daunting time, during the height of pandemic-fueled market uncertainty. But we felt it would create clear advantages for financial advisors and their clients, so we got to work executing our plan.

A colleague recently shared a blog that in essence questioned why quantitative investment strategies, and specifically trend following, was not more widely embraced by the investment management industry. It was a compelling question that prompted me to consider a larger one: Is it human nature to distrust simplicity?

Liquid alternatives are darlings of diversification and downside protection for some advisors, many of whom looked in the rear-view mirror during and after the Great Recession and saw the need for a new way to manage risk.

Now that liquid alts have outgrown adolescence and had ample opportunity to prove their mettle, we examined their performance in a just-released primer, “An Alternative to Liquid Alternatives.”