Top 10 YourStake Insights articles of 2023

2023 has been an exciting year for the entire team where we covered many topics from navigating the Anti-ESG movement to discussions on how Direct Indexing can help deliver personalization, and in the last few months have highlighted all the ways AI is poised to transform the daily work Advisors will spend less time on. 

As is customary with this time of year, we’ve collected the top 10 most-read posts across our blog to recap a year's worth of content in one place. 

10. How AI is transforming new client acquisition

The journey to close a prospective client can be lengthy and winding. From that first contact to transitioning assets, there are many back office-intensive mile markers along the way - scheduling initial meetings, preparing for discovery sessions, transcribing and analyzing statements, formulating the proposal, presenting the plan, and more. 

We examine how AI is changing the path to converting prospects to clients faster with new tools that can extract essential investment information, prepare comprehensive and personalized analyses, and build talking points and presentations at the press of a few buttons to help get to a yes faster from prospects.

9. ESG Scores among investors’ top complaints

Many investors want to factor environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into their investment decisions. ESG scores started as a well-intentioned means to simplify this process. 

However, the inconsistency across ESG rating providers has had the opposite effect. Investors are now struggling to unpack the providers’ data and methodologies to arrive at comparisons that actually make sense. 

We explore ways to get past the ESG score dilemma by removing a black box approach and discover additional ways to factor ESG frameworks into investment considerations.

8. From JP Morgan to Eden Financial: A Journey of Entrepreneurship and Impact

‍Read and listen to this episode of our video/podcast series, YourStake Your Story where Nycole Freer, CFP, bfa, and founder of Eden Financial joins Gabe Rissman to share her experience opening her own practice and also recently writing a children’s book-focused on starting good money habits at an early age.

7. How aware of investment harm are you?

Read and listen to this episode of our video/podcast series, YourStake Your Story where Marco Vangelisti, CFA, Founder of EK4T and Founding member of Slow Money, shares his experience in shifting to 100% aware and no-harm investing and how that impacted his outlook on how to drive investment impact.

6. Gabe Rissman’s predictions for ESG and Values-Based Investing for 2023

At the very start of the year, Gabe Rissman came up with his top predictions for ESG and Values-Based Investing in 2023 while also sharing a short timeline of how ESG investing has evolved in recent years. 

This post serves as a time capsule of sorts as this was before the summer of Anti-ESG pushback and while many things have changed, the goal to both help Advisors bring value alignment to their client's portfolios and the never-ending battle to collecting good ESG data continues.

5. We've launched Advisor Core, a new portfolio analysis and proposal generation tool for advisors powered with AI

Normally product release posts don’t make the top 5, but this is a special exception, recap the initial launch of Advisor Core with us as we celebrate the launch of our newest product, Advisor Core.

4. How to power personalization through Values Aligned Direct Indexing

‍Read how YourStake and First Affirmative Financial Network have combined investment management expertise and state-of-the-art technology to enhance direct indexing to enable Advisors to seamlessly meet the challenges ahead. 

These enhancements come through the Values Aligned Direct Index Solution (VADIS), which enables Advisors to deliver financial and impact performance, high-quality portfolios, unrivaled values-driven customization, and full transparency in both inputs and output to your clients – more quickly with better analysis.

3. How is the “anti-ESG movement” impacting ESG investing?

Looking back at the start of the Anti-ESG movement, we put together this resource as a way to understand what exactly this “movement” was and how to help navigate it with clients. 

As the conversation continues to develop around what ESG might look like for different Advisors, look back at a piece of that timeline.

2. 7 useful ESG investment strategy definitions for explaining your approach

ESG investing can be a difficult conversation for many, so having the same definitions to begin a conversation around how to use ESG data to both add value alignment and understand long-term risk is essential. 

We put together the seven key definitions you might come across when discussing ESG topics and even added a free-to-download definition sheet to keep handy.

1, Institutional vs Retail Investors: Who’s driving ESG investment?

Now for the top post of 2023! 

We examined the differences between Institutional and retail investors and their reasons for investing across ESG themes. 

One surprising difference in the motivations was around the concept of how ESG data is a powerful tool for assessing the risk-adjusted returns for institutional investments while retail investors are leading the way for aligning their investments with their values. 

Conclusion

While we’ve expanded our blog topics this year beyond ESG investing and data to also highlight new frontiers in technology, Direct indexing, and more, the looming need to understand more about ESG investing is clear. With our background as an ESG data science team first, with more ways now than ever to bring any client closer to a future of aligning their values with investments, we’ve been excited to cover many important topics this year. 

We’re building out our content calendar for 2024, so be sure to keep an eye out for new updates from our newsletter and LinkedIn to stay up to date on the latest from the team!