Mike Fickell is the Chief Investment Officer of FC Wealth Solutions, a registered investment advisor, and a client of InvestiQuant since 2013. Prior to becoming the CIO at FC Wealth Solutions, he spent 15 years on Wall Street as an institutional portfolio manager. Mike’s professional experience provides him a unique perspective and he was kind enough to share some helpful tips for investors new to autotrading with InvestiQuant.
First Tip: “I would make this (iQ Autotrading) a portion of your overall investment plan, not your entire plan. We often suggest something between 5-25% of our client’s portfolios are in alternative investments. The exact number would depend on their level of comfort with alternative investments and the underlying manager along with how it correlates with other parts of their portfolio and their income. If you allocate too much to it, you run the risk trying to micromanage it and/or bailing on it when it underperforms. If you don’t allocate enough to it, it may not have an impact on the overall portfolio, especially if you view it as a hedge or offset to traditional stocks and bonds.”
Second Tip: “Would be to set the proper expectations for it and then leave it alone. Do not expect it to always outperform traditional assets. It often does better when traditional assets are under duress but there could be times it could be down in those environments as well. Every strategy goes through periods of under-performance so do not be quick to judge. More important to me when evaluating strategies are evaluating performances over long time periods, is whether the managers are invested in their own product, and how engaged and adaptive the managers are to continuously improving their strategy. Long-term value investors may not need to be very adaptive because that strategy has been around for hundreds of years, but short-term trading strategies need to be more adaptive because trading conditions evolve more frequently. InvestiQuant’s commitment to investing in their own programs and their passion for continued improvement give me a ton of confidence that they are positioned to be as successful as anyone in this space.”
Click here to read the full interview with FC Wealth's Mike Fickell