Michelle Yu:

Hi everyone. It's no secret that there are key strategies when it comes to advisors helping meet their client's investment goals. And with that, I'm excited to bring in someone who knows all about that and is here to tell us more. Here in our New York studios as Andrew Okrongly, Director of Model Portfolios at WisdomTree Asset Management. And first off, I want to kick things off by having Andrew give us a high-level overview of WisdomTree's CIO-managed portfolios, what they are, and how they're designed to help advisors meet their clients' investment goals. Hello, Andrew.

Andrew Okrongly:

Michelle, thanks. Our CIO-managed model portfolios are multi-asset class, multi-manager, ETF-based model portfolio solutions. We began managing these back in 2013 really as more of an exercise of how can financial advisors integrate WisdomTree ETFs into a total portfolio context. Since then, we've made tremendous amount of investments into the business. We've really expanded the suite of model portfolios that we have available. We were one of the first managers to make a really concerted commitment to open architecture. So integrating, doing due diligence, and investing, allocating to ETFs from other third-party managers, not just WisdomTree funds, in our portfolios. And we now have over $6 billion of assets under advisory. So we've really commercialized the business, grown the business and scaled. And at this point we now manage CIO... Our CIO-managed models span portfolio strategies that are focused on traditional core strategic investment strategies, income generation, incorporating alternatives into portfolios. And importantly, our collaboration with our senior economist, Professor Jeremy Siegel, our Siegel WisdomTree model portfolios, which really bring to life, if advisors are familiar with his work in stocks for the long run future for investors, these are portfolios that really bring to life the key takeaways in teaching from his research as professor at the Wharton School. And these are portfolios that have really resonated in the industry.

Michelle Yu:

Thank you for that, Andrew. And I want to continue talking about all the WisdomTree model portfolio investment committee here, because as Andrew alluded to, Professor Jeremy Siegel had a lot to do with it. So I want him to discuss how their collective expertise shapes the portfolio decisions. Can you tell us?

Andrew Okrongly:

Yeah. We really bring together a wide range of perspectives in our investment committee. You mentioned our senior economist to WisdomTree, Professor Jeremy Siegel, his decades of research. He's on our committee and participates in the committee. Our own global chief investment officer at WisdomTree, Jeremy Schwartz, myself, and a handful of other key senior investment professionals that come from our research portfolio management and fixed income teams as well. And it's really this group of individuals that I think bring a very unique approach where we're focused on academic insights, we bring real-world hands-on investment experience, but also quantitative research into investment decision-making, into the ongoing focus on how is our performance and risk behaving in all of these portfolios relative to objectives. We've really made a really strong commitment, I think, to governance and the oversight of these portfolios. And it's a real institutional caliber group of individuals, team that's responsible for the governance of all of our model portfolios, both the CIO-managed models, but also all the shared CIO models that we manage and build in collaboration with individual advisor teams or home offices.

Michelle Yu:

All right. I want to talk more about the investment committee and basically how you go about constructing and managing these portfolios over time. And what's the decision-making process throughout it?

Andrew Okrongly:

Right. Our investment committee meets at least on a monthly basis and really more frequently than that when markets are moving. I think it's again, this unique perspective and experiences that we bring to the table that allows us to cut through the noise and really either, in any given market environment, reconfirm or potentially reassess, if conditions warrant, our views. And so our committee, where typically our portfolios are going to be longer term strategic in nature, that said, we're constantly looking for parts of the market, whether it's on the equity side, the bond side, the alternative side, parts of the market where we might feel that there's risk mispriced or where there's potential risk reward upside opportunities and trying to capitalize on those. And to that extent, we also do manage some tactical model portfolios where we have a shorter term time horizon with investment decisions and we do look at some sort of technical based indicators where appropriate.

Michelle Yu:

I want to now talk about the guiding principles or investment philosophy that underpin the CIO-managed portfolios and how these principles come to life in the way the portfolios are managed.

Andrew Okrongly:

Yeah, it's a great question. I think you go back to the founding of WisdomTree and one of our key tenants or key philosophical, that was really the philosophies underpinning our firm has been a focus on fundamentals and being grounded in fundamentals when making investment decisions rather than just pure kind of market cap weighted beta approach to investing. And that's certainly something that still is core to all of our CIO-managed model portfolios. I think in addition to that, we are also very focused on diversification, not just relying solely on asset class diversification, but diversification across sources of return, finding unique drivers of return to bring into portfolios. Risk management is another key part of our investment philosophy. Typically, that means risk management relative to some sort of benchmark or index. And I think when we identify a part of the market, a sector, a factor style that we want to lean into, we're focused on doing that in a appropriately-sized fashion, a way that's consistent with the expectations and objectives of any particular mandate. Because that's ultimately, what we're really kind of trying to do is to deliver value, deliver better risk-adjusted returns, but in a consistent, predictable fashion for advisors and their end clients.

Michelle Yu:

So for the financial advisors that are watching this right now, how can they practically use these models within their practice and where can they go to access or learn more about them, Andrew?

Andrew Okrongly:

Yeah, I would say first and foremost, our website has an immense amount of resources beyond just our portfolios. And advisors can go onto the WisdomTree website, navigate to the portfolio solutions page. That's a great place to start. In terms of how advisors use our portfolios, I'd say we see a lot. We see people using them as total portfolio solutions, advisors that want to use them as building blocks as part of other strategies or SMAs in portfolios. And in terms of access, we're integrated with major model market platform providers, including Quorus, a really innovative platform and asset manager. And I would say overall, it's about making these portfolios accessible to a wide range of advisors wherever they are, and either delivering them something off the shelf as part of our CIO-managed portfolios that meet their needs or in some cases, even working with specific advisors or home office to design something that's more bespoke, more custom to their unique client goals.

Michelle Yu:

Andrew, thank you so much for enriching us with this insightful knowledge.

Andrew Okrongly:

Thank you very much, Michelle.

Michelle Yu:

All right. And that'll do it for us here on Asset TV. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Michelle Yu and I'll see you next time.