Jonathan Scheid, President of Buckingham Strategic Partners, joined Keith Black, Managing Director of RIA Channel, to discuss the growing role of ETFs in an evidence-driven investment process.
With $28.82 billion in discretionary assets and $7.25 billion in ETF assets as of March 31, 2024, Buckingham Strategic Wealth ranks #11 in RIA Channel’s list of the Top 50 ETF Power Users.
Buckingham Strategic Partners serves independent financial advisors with the goal of maximizing the advisor’s time with clients (TWC), which allows them to take their practice to the next level. Advisors can work with Buckingham to outsource administrative and investment tasks, including billing, operations, trading, technology, wealth stack, reporting, and financial planning tools.
While Buckingham may have functioned as a turnkey asset management platform (TAMP) in the 1990s, the firm has grown to become a comprehensive advisor platform (CAP). Over time, Buckingham continues to add to its breadth of solutions. Advisors can access members of the Buckingham team who are experts in issues facing business owners, advance planning, and retirement planning. These services go beyond the tech stack and investment solutions commonly provided by TAMPs.
As an evidence-based investment firm, Buckingham focuses on accessing return factors in the strategic asset allocation as efficiently as possible. Rather than exclusively accessing core equity exposure, Scheid tilts globally diversified portfolios toward factors that have been historically additive to returns, such as small caps, value, and profitability. Portfolio construction targets tracking error to broad market exposures, varying exposure over time based on recent factor performance.
After the 2019 ETF rule, Buckingham has been adding to its ETF exposure as actively managed funds targeting factor exposures have been launched. Buckingham saw several of its active mutual fund managers, including Dimensional, launch ETFs of the same strategy. Converting ETFs to mutual funds can potentially reduce transaction costs, management fees, tax liabilities, and custody costs.
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