Advisor Perspectives, a leading publisher serving financial advisors and the financial advisory community, has announced its Venerated Voices™ awards for commentaries published in 2015. Rankings were issued in three categories: The Top 25 Venerated Voices™ by Firm, The Top 25 Venerated Voices™ by Author and The Top 10 Venerated Voices™ by Commentary.
Leading the Top 25 Venerated Voices™ by Firm category was Pring Turner Capital Group of Walnut Creek, CA, followed by Boston’s Grantham Mayo van Otterloo (GMO). In third place was California’s Oaktree Capital Management.
Among individual commentators, the most-widely read was Martin Pring of Pring Turner Capital Management, followed by Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital. Third place went to Jeremy Grantham of GMO.
Out of the top ten commentaries in 2015, Lance Robert’s blog Streettalk Live took five spots, including the first and third place. Charles Schwab took second.
The most-widely read commentary of 2015 was Dalbar: Why Investors Suck And Tips For Advisors by Lance Roberts of Streettalk Live. Roberts’ piece was published April 8th and discussed Dalbar’s annual investor-behavior report. It detailed the underperformance of advisors relative to benchmarks and suggested that lack of capital and psychology are the contributing factors.
Coming in second was Schwab’s Perspective on Recent Market Volatility. Published August 21st after a particularly poor week in the markets, Schwab’s team answered a number of questions regarding the then-current state of the economy and market. These included topics related to sell-offs, the Fed, commodities, domestic and Chinese currencies.
Streettalk Live also took third place with The Real Financial Crisis That Is Looming, published May 5th. Roberts said a financial crisis is on the horizon – unrelated to a financial market meltdown. He said the lack of financial stability in this country will continue to change our economic landscape. The ongoing structural shift in the economy -- due to factors such as low wage growth, minimal savings and longer life expectancy -- will inevitably cause financial instability.
Advisor Perspectives’ website currently attracts over 175,000 unique visitors per month, virtually all of them financial advisors serving high- and ultra-high net worth individuals. The company publishes economic and market commentaries submitted by fund companies, advisors and independent research firms. In 2015, over 2,800 such commentaries were published, 300 more than in 2014, and made available through a daily newsletter, Research Perspectives, which the company emails to its subscribers.
Venerated Voices™ rankings were determined based on the number of unique readers of each commentary, using data provided electronically by the third-party web analytics service Google Analytics. The data were normalized to reflect the fact that usage of Advisor Perspectives’ website grew steadily over the course of the quarter. While for the annual awards for the firm and author, a minimum of three commentaries must have been submitted during the year, any participant is eligible to receive a quarterly award. Each firm and author was assigned a relative score, with a score of 100 equal to average readership.
Advisor Perspectives was founded in 2007 and is based in Lexington, MA. In addition to Research Perspectives, it publishes a widely read weekly newsletter, Advisor Perspectives, which contains original articles on the markets, the economy and practice management.
Advisor Perspectives will continue providing quarterly updates to its rankings, as well as issuing annual Venerated Voices™ awards.
