Welcome to the first in a series of industry content from Panoramix designed to help advisors succeed in a more challenging operating environment.

When an advisor today is looking for a system to manage their clients’ portfolios, there are a lot of options available. Some custodians offer statements and basic reporting on their web sites and many industry CRMs gather portfolio information, and for a relatively low cost, an advisor can have a lot of information readily available to them for various reporting purposes.

However, the cost jumps dramatically if advisors want to include performance reporting, due to its complexity and the current way in which performance reporting systems inefficiently manage data.

Which begs the question, why is performance reporting so expensive? Is there something about computing performance on a portfolio that is so complicated or different that it warrants such a high price? Historically, the answer has been yes for the following reasons.