UniFi by CAIA Crossing the Threshold - 37

THE RETURN JOURNEY
A New Path Forward
Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CFP®, CIPM, FDP
Managing Director, Head of UniFi by CAIA™
CAIA Association
As our industry continues to democratize access to alternatives, products proliferate, and
interest in the wealth management industry increases, we believe it's important to step
back and invest the time and effort to fully prepare yourself, your firm, and your clients
before starting to implement. Providing access is the easy part. CAIA Association has
publicly supported broader access to alternative investments since its inception. However,
there's a very important caveat that clients should come before products, and education
should come before investing.
With that, crossing the threshold and breaking free from 0% to any asset class is often a
difficult and time-consuming effort, but the pre-work is valuable and can often determine
future outcomes. Therefore, we suggest the following considerations as key components of
this important work:
Keep it Strategic and Long-Term. Integrating alternative investments into investor's
portfolios requires long-term thinking and implementation, these illiquid strategies take
many years to integrate into a portfolio fully and properly and the temptation to time
markets may be high.
However, to properly reap the performance benefits of these strategies, investors should
make alternatives a part of the strategic asset allocation and make these decisions based
on the investor's profile, as opposed to tactically trying to time certain asset classes or
select them on a deal-by-deal basis. As Fran Kinniry said, " When done right, with a client
centered approach, and making sure critical questions are addressed, adding top a quartile
alternative investment can be a valuable addition to the client portfolio. "
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UniFi by CAIA Crossing the Threshold

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