How to use VAST in Your Practice
VAST is an entirely new way of bringing personalization and tax management to retail investors. VAST seeks to harness the unique capabilities of Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs) to enhance the investment experience of an entire portfolio.
Unlike pooled investment vehicles, in which each investor’s shares are identical to those of every other investor, the SMA structure allows for:
- Individual tax treatment,
- In-kind transfers into, out of, and even within the strategy,
- Customization of portfolio content to reflect personal beliefs, values or restrictions, and
- Tax-efficient diversification of concentrated positions.
How does VAST work?
Building around a Direct Index SMA core, VAST allows for the harmonious inclusion of actively managed SMAs, ETFs, mutual funds, and individual securities. VAST’s portfolio management team can apply customization filters, tax management and optimization to the entire portfolio, not just to the index. And VAST does all of this at scale, leaving advisors more time to nurture their existing relationships and attract new clients.
How can VAST benefit your practice and your clients?
All financial advisory practices eventually face a seemingly impossible choice: protect client relationships through greater personalization, or sacrifice customization in the service of scale. VAST removes that enduring challenge by enabling personalized investing at scale®. Learn more about the VAST experience and how it can help different types of clients.
How can you learn more about VAST?
Visit our resource library to find other insights that explain how VAST works. You can also contact the VAST sales team for a private demonstration of the advisor portal and transition analysis tool.
There is no assurance that a separately managed account (“SMA”) will achieve its investment objective. SMAs are subject to market risk, which is the possibility that the market values of the securities in an account will decline and that the value of the securities may therefore be less than what you paid for them. There is no assurance that investment products based upon indices will accurately track index performance or provide positive investment returns. Inclusion of a security within an index is not a recommendation by VAS to buy, sell, or hold such security, nor is it considered to be investment advice. Investment strategies that seek to enhance after-tax performance may be unable to fully realize strategic gains or harvest losses. Tax-loss harvesting involves the risks that the new investment could perform worse than the original investment and that transaction costs could offset the tax benefit. There are limitations inherent in the use of an optimization methodology to manage accounts relative to a designated index; for instance, the optimization tools are not designed to account for current market conditions and any short-term market fluctuations. The optimization tools may seek to estimate individual tax circumstances but cannot incorporate all individual tax information, potentially leading to inaccuracies.
