Asset Managers compete in a tight arena – some investment strategies are crowded with other active managers, some are filled with passive investments and others have competitors who appear similar but really are not. Surveying the manager landscape and identifying all the funds that are similar to your strategy based on the factors you care about can be quite challenging and time-consuming. Preparing RFP responses about competitors or just listing your competitors’ relative strengths requires constant review and updating. 

How do you find all your closest competitors? How similar are your competitors’ strategies? How similar or different are their factor signatures? Which funds can most easily convince your investors to switch to them because they replicate enough of your ‘secret sauce’ while offering other exposures too? Does your idea for that new fund already have strong competitors?

The solution, we think, is straightforward. Our new module, Similyzer™ is a comprehensive holdings-based comparison tool that has taken surveying the equity manager landscape to a whole new level. Similyzer™ lets you identify all your true competitors and really get under their hood:

• Quickly search for similarities and differences on any subset of 130+ factors for all 28,000+ funds in the Morningstar and eVestment databases.
• Identify each competitor’s biggest strengths and weaknesses to your fund. This can provide convincing evidence to a prospective investor. 
• Launching a new fund with many competitors? Similyzer™ helps you to develop a richer and more relevant story for your investors, providing confidence that your fund is the best investment option within a crowded market. 
• Identifying your closest competitors is critical to stopping them from taking your investors from you. Similyzer™ shows you exactly how they are stronger and weaker than your fund on a wide variety of metrics like factor exposures, performance, risk and ESG. Our ESG capabilities include identifying your portfolio’s carbon footprint using the TCFD recommended metrics through Sustainalytics. 

Here’s an example of a low volatility fund and its most similar competitor. While you can see that they are quite similar on both volatility and quality measures, they provide very different exposures to Value, Growth, Size and Momentum. Having this information gives you the factor edge to compete.