If you would like to schedule some time to go through Astro in more detail please contact: empower@orion.com to schedule a demo.
**Orion is not itself GIPS verified, and does not serve as a GIPS verifier.**
Q&A
Q:How do I tag accounts as belonging to a certain composite group?
A: You would designate the grouping assignments for the account in Portfolio Audit. Possible groupings include model, management style, representative, custodian, qualified plan, etc.
Q: What data queries can I use to pull back information from Composites for my GIPS verifier?
A:
| ID | Query Name |
| 11642 | GIPS Verification – Composite Membership List |
| 11632 | GIPS Verification – Included Daily Portfolio Values |
| 11623 | GIPS Verification – Included Portfolio Month End Holdings |
| 11562 | GIPS Verification – Monthly Composite Portfolio Data |
| 11641 | GIPS Verification – Monthly, Qtrly, Annual Composite Performance by Date (Model) |
| 11550 | GIPS Verification – Monthly, Qtrly, Annual Composite Performance by Date Mgt Style |
| 11596 | GIPS Verification – Portfolio Level Transactions |
Q&A:
Q: When can you use Buy/Hold as the rebalance interval?
A: Buy and hold assumes the portfolio or account never rebalances. So it wouldn’t be used unless you never rebalance.
Q: What guidance can you give for firms who rebalance annually, but not on the same date for all clients? Will there be a large difference between a client who rebalances in April compared to one who rebalances in October?
A: Our system uses the inception date as the start date for rebalancing. So if an account starts in April and rebalances annually, the benchmark would not be rebalanced until April of the following year.
Q: Are there any potential problems when using an actual security as a component of a blended benchmark? Do securities use the price return or the total return in the calculation?
A: Most marketable securities will use what we call an “adjusted price return”, or total return. However, if you are using a manually maintained or private product, or one that is receiving prices from ByAll or other screen-scraping aggregators, we may not receive dividend information for those products so the return would be a price return in those instances.
Q: Can we use an alternate index (other than the S&P 500) as the index when calculating risk statistics?
A: Yes, this is what we call the statistical index, which can be changed at the database level as an entity option. Additionally, there is an option to change this one-off when running Composite reports. Contact the performance team for more information on this.
Q: We are using Blended Benchmarks to track our model performance, because we can track the historical allocation changes in the Blended Benchmarks app. Is Orion working on an easier way for us to do this?
A: Yes! We currently have a project out to add the ability to track historical allocation changes at the model level. We do not have an ETA for when this development will be completed.
This webinar will demonstrate two optimizations and how to create a target strategy template within the ASTRO Advanced portfolio optimizer.
Question & Answer:
- Why is the S&P return different for each account?
- The benchmark or index return will pull for the same date range as the entity that it is being compared to. So, for the inception time period, the return for the S&P 500 at the account levels was different because each account had a different inception date.
- Is there a way to see benchmark performance by itself without household performance?
- We don’t have a way to pull back performance for a standard index without comparing it to a portfolio in Orion. This is due to our agreement with our index data providers. However, we do have several data queries that will pull back performance for blended benchmarks without pulling portfolio information.
- Is there a way to show what asset class is represented by a benchmark on reports because clients won’t know what the names of the benchmarks mean? We’ve made a blended benchmark and it displays on our report. Is there a way to list that out on the report. It just reads 60/40 or 40/60. It doesn’t show how it is broken down.
- We recommend being as transparent as possible when you name your Blended Benchmarks in Orion because that is what the clients will see. We would recommend renaming them something like “60% equity/ 40% bond” so that the clients know what the benchmark is representing at a glance.
- Is there a way to mass assign benchmarks to a group of households?
- Yes! You can mass assign benchmarks using our User Defined & Entity Option custom import. Additionally, this article will provide step-by-step instructions on the entire process.