Guggenheim Investment Advisory announced Wednesday that it had launched of the Guggenheim Alternatives Platform, a web-based platform designed for independent advisors. The platform enables advisors to "build and implement customized hedge fund portfolios for their clients by connecting them to Guggenheim Investment Advisory's deeply researched menu of hedge fund managers, according to the company.
"We made it easy to use," Michael Christ, head of Guggenheim Investment Advisory, told AdvisorOne at Schwab Impact 2012 in Chicago. "We come from the advisory world, so we understand the issues they're confronted with in getting access to hedge fund managers."
The platform is unique, he said, not only in the access it grants to managers, but also in the supply, support, research themes and allocation concepts it offers. The investment team consists of 40 individuals that "are all seasoned, come from various backgrounds and speak the nine languages of across 10 countries."
"We created the platform for ourselves in 2006," Christ noted. "We used it to solve for our own needs, so therefore made it available to advisors."
He added that the platform is flexible, and "can fit into the investment philosophies of our advisors" in three ways.
"The first is that they can pick managers off of a 50-managers list. If you think about the size of the hedge fund universe, there are 10,000 managers, so we scoured the industry for the best."
The second method is that advisors "can take some of our guidance in regards to market themes and invest in that manner."
