By Jonathan Scott
Director of Core Product at Nitrogen
Back in 2018, we built Detailed Portfolio Stats — “Stats,” for short — for a really simple reason: advisors were asking us for it, over and over again.
What we heard so often was that whether or not advisors conducted all their research inside of Nitrogen, they tended to end up in Nitrogen to build portfolios and models and optimize them for specific risk objectives. This was the language they’d learned to speak with their clients — the language of the Risk Number®. We’ve also found that advisors simply love building portfolios in Nitrogen because of our care for design and experience.
Portfolios, proposals, and models have always been a core part of the Nitrogen experience, and advisors love the analytics we surface there: The Risk Number, GPA®, expense ratio, annual dividend, asset classes, and more. The catch was that last bit; while there is “more,” advisors wanted a little more than more.
And so we gave it to them!
And what we’ve heard from the advisors using Stats since we launched back in 2018 is one of the reasons I love working with our product development teams. Just like with anything we do, we focused so much on the design and the experience, but with Stats, we focused especially on compelling data visualization.
Powerful visuals promote powerful conversations, and we’ve seen this with Stats over and over again. For every client that pays you “so they don’t have to think about that stuff” (we’ve heard that, too ) there’s another that needs to see what’s going on under the hood before they can let go of the wheel. They want to see the intentionality and the thought process behind the portfolio you’ve selected or constructed for them. Although we set out to build Stats for advisors to use by themselves, it has become a really powerful conversation tool for advisors to use with clients as well.
Today, we’re proud to release the biggest update to Stats since we launched it in 2018. Let me tell you all about it.
First up, we’ve re-envisioned Modeled Performance — one of our most popular and interactive Stats widgets — where timeframes and benchmarks are fully configurable and each of the statistics you see are dynamically calculated based on those selections.
- We started with providing some additional flexibility in setting benchmarks, giving you the ability to select from a curated list of index proxies, blended benchmarks, client portfolios, proposals, models, or any individual security. Some of our awesome beta users have even started building out some “benchmark” models to further customize what they can do in Stats. Super cool!
- We’ve doubled down on the powerful analysis tools available in Modeled Performance, and now, you can select from up to 14 statistics to add to your Modeled Performance analysis. Favor Sortino Ratio over Sharpe Ratio? We’ve got you covered. Think that Time-to-Recovery is a critical point of context when interpreting Max Drawdown? Add it with your new Stats Toolbox.
- Surprised by a statistic at the portfolio level? Want to see what might be contributing to that figure? We’ve made that easier than ever in Stats. Now you can expand the portfolio in Modeled Performance and view all those same statistics for its top 15 allocations. If you have total return enabled, this can be a great way to quickly highlight your “winners” and “losers” during a specified time frame, all within the context of a portfolio.
- You’ll also notice that we’ve added the ability to sort all your comparisons by each statistic, making it simple to rank them by Risk Number, Max Drawdown, or anything else.
And that’s just the beginning. Stats has become packed with tools to keep you prepared for those analytics-focused client conversations.
- We’ve recently added Mute Account functionality to Stats, which makes it drop-dead simple to highlight the impact of poor performance in a held-away account, or the impact of strong performance in accounts under your management.
- We’ve centralized Diversification, combining a redesigned Correlations widget with Diversified Risk and an all-new 95% Probability Capture widget, communicating the impact of a portfolio’s hedging characteristics on its potential range of outcomes.
- Our redesigned Asset Classification widget still surfaces the portfolio’s exposure to equity and bond sectors, but now, each is framed in relation to one another in a single visual, and in the table below we’ve added a benchmark reference for each included sector.
- Regional Exposure has also been redesigned and now includes that benchmark reference as well.
- We’ve supercharged the Risk and Reward scatter plot. Quickly hop between one of three time frames and click on your client’s portfolio to zoom in and explore where that portfolio’s holdings fall on the same graph.
- We’ve added a Size and Style visual to help you explore portfolio composition from yet another interactive lens, allowing you to group the chart by Size (small cap, mid cap, large cap) or by Style (value, blend, growth).
- And lastly, all of this is now available in two beautifully designed printed reports! The Stats Overview Report focuses on a single portfolio, while the Stats Comparison Report frames two portfolios side-by-side.
But I saved my favorite for last: the Portfolio Sandbox. Available in Nitrogen Elite, the Sandbox makes all this extra intelligence actionable like never before. With it, you can make test adjustments to a portfolio and see the impact of those changes on historical performance, sector exposure, or risk-return efficiency, all without ever leaving Stats or even changing your scroll position!
With Sandbox, you can move seamlessly between Individual Security Analysis (to analyze a fund you might be considering) and Detailed Portfolio Stats (to test out its impact on a core model or client proposal). Best of all, we’ve woven Sandbox directly into our proposal and model creation process, so if you’re ready to turn those test changes into actual changes, you can create a Nitrogen proposal directly with just a click.
I absolutely love getting to see advisors unleashing their inner math geek and empowering the world to invest fearlessly, and I think you’re going to love these new enhancements.
Want some training? Our Success Coaches would be happy to spend some 1:1 time with you. Not yet using Nitrogen Elite? We’d love to show you around.