K4 Plan Goals' unique system and results have been the subject of both research and white papers. They run the gamut from a look a the process under its hood and a real life example of how K4 Plan Goals can help calm participants in today's turbulent markets, to white papers discussing its unique business model and benefits for fiduciaries. You'll find them all below.
Target date funds can play a vital role in simplifying 401(k) participants’ retirement strategies, but they cannot provide the entire answer. A complete strategy includes participants’ goals and priorities. This multi-dimensional solution includes much more than investment risk and return, and is now achievable for all participants using Klein Decisions’ K4 Plan Goals.
Today’s retirement savings calculators and guidance tools fail to guide or motivate retirement plan participants to action because they fail to provide an engaging process or a comprehensive final answer. Klein Decisions’ K4 Plan Goals is an entirely new approach that overcomes these problems and measurably increases participant success, keeps fiduciaries on track, and easily conforms to meet provider business needs.
From "Advisor Perspectives", Vol.3, Issue 3, January 20, 2009
Emotional times like these often lead investors, both individual and institutional, to make decisions that can have major negative repercussions on their long-term investment goals. This is when an advisor's guidance can be extremely valuable. While it may not be possible to recoup last year's losses immediately, just keeping participants on the right track can be invaluable for the long-term. K4 Plan Goals can clearly illustrate what participants need to do now -- and for many, the changes may be less drastic than they think.
K4 Plan Goals benefits the participants by helping them achieve a better retirement lifestyle, the plan sponsor by meeting or exceeding fiduciary duties, and the service provider by providing a more stable and profitable client relationship. In addition, its unique business model enables providers to increase profits quickly with little or no short run budget impact. Here is an example of how this can work for a typical plan.
Under ERISA's prudent man rule, fiduciaries are required to consider the needs of 401(k) participants and provide suitable services for saving and investing. K4 Plan Goals assists participants with these decisions with a methodology that exceeds the standards of "fiduciary compliance". K4 Plan Goals is a "best practice".
The newest version of K4 Portfolio Selection has already drawn attention and been the subject of several different articles. The most recent appear below. Look for their number to continue growing as more and more advisors become acquainted with this revolutionary investor suitability and profiling product.
Investors’ conflicting goals and preferences can complicate the suitability and profiling process. The ideal solution would resolve all these conflicts at once, require only a few, easy to understand inputs, point the investor to a portfolio with the highest probability of achieving the objectives, and do it all in an engaging manner. The ideal solution is Klein Decisions' K4 Portfolio Selection.
From "Advisor Perspectives", Vol.3, Issue 43, October 20, 2009
Many investors suffered substantial losses in 2008, so it is only natural that they are rethinking their goals and investments. For some, this is simply a knee-jerk reaction to the recent past, but others have truly had their risk profile altered with their declining wealth. Advisors must help determine if clients really need a different strategic portfolio or if it is best to stay the course. A solid profiling process will support the determination.
K4 Fund Selection is not only a distinctly different means of evaluating and monitoring mutual funds, it also a valuable research tool. The papers below describe how its process differs from traditional screening and illustrate its superior results. You will also find details of specific factor models created with K4 Fund Selection along with their outcomes.
From "Advisor Perspectives", Vol.3, Issue 29, July 21, 2009
When you look at how a mutual fund is managed, you expect the fund manager to constantly evaluate the process used to evaluate assets and sectors. Would you be confident recommending a fund manager who simply stuck to a time-worn process regardless of its results? Of course not, and your clients shouldn't expect any less of you. With stricter regulations on the horizon, it's time you reviewed your mutual fund selection process.
Analysts and advisors need an effective means of analyzing mutual funds. Many rely on traditional screens that basically function as pass/fail tests. Rather than comparing funds, they simply produce an unordered list of survivors. Weighted Factor models offer a superior alternative. As with traditional screening, they start with the selection of criteria for evaluation, but then allow the user to weight the factors on their relative importance. The result is a rank ordering of funds rather than a simple list of survivors, with the top funds having the highest combination of all the weighted factors.
Indexers charge that the “average” mutual fund will not consistently outperform the appropriate index. But are investors really looking for “average” funds? Following other research that supports persistence in individual fund performance for short to intermediate periods, we’ve used K4 Fund Selection to construct portfolios of funds that have produced superior results. Soon you’ll be able to invest in them.
From "Advisor Perspectives", Vol.1, Issue 25, October 30, 2007
Three primary standards of value-added return are alpha, the Sharpe Ratio, and the Information Ratio. All three are related, but there are significant differences. Not only do the calculations differ, so does the “value” each measures. These differences determine which statistic is the most appropriate under any given set of circumstances. The key is to recognize which is most fitting in your specific analysis.
In addition to designing, selling, and supporting state of the art investment decision tools, Klein Decisions, Inc.'s experienced professionals also conduct investment related research. Other Klein research papers periodically appear in our client newsletter,The Kleinpost.
Discussions are often held about the use of using rolling period analysis vs. single end point analysis for fund and manager evaluation. This short paper focuses on some of the pros and cons of using rolling period analysis.
Over the past several decades, many approaches have been used to understand investor's risk and return expectations. Currently two distinctly different approaches are in use. With the first method, investors answer a series of questions, some of which may not be investment related, to determine the level of risk they are comfortable with, then similar recommendations are made to all investors in that risk-level group. This article discusses a second method focused exclusively on investment issues relevant to high-net-worth and small institutional investors.
Due to the shortcomings of screening and filtering methods in manager and fund evaluation, many advisors and analysts have sought ways to incorporate the importance of their investment criteria to differentiate results. In most instances, these advisors are faced with the time-consuming task of building and maintaining their own evaluation tools. The very fact that they are willing to go to this extent to utilize multi-factor models is a testament to the shortcomings of existing analysis tools.
Many investment models are constructed using single point statistics such as five-year return or ten-year alpha. Others prefer to measure the same factors over rolling periods. Each approach has its plusses and minuses and each has its staunch believers. We look at data from 1997-2006 to gauge which is more predictive of future performance. The results are surprising.
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