Services

Your SHDR-IA investment adviser can help you address investment issues, including asset allocation, setting objectives, choosing portfolio managers and/or appropriate investment selections, and monitoring and evaluating your investment processes.

After working closely with you to determine your goals and develop your investment strategy, your adviser leads you through each stage of a highly disciplined investment selection process. Your adviser will recommend the right mix of top-performing investment managers for you, whether mutual funds, commingled funds or individual accounts.

Collaborating with you, your investment adviser will:

• Help define goals and establish investment strategies
• Develop proper asset allocation
• Conduct exhaustive investment manager search
• Create your Investment Policy Statement
• Monitor investment managers continuously
• Conduct periodic review of investment policy and strategy
• Provide quarterly evaluation updates to your fiduciary committee
• Assume cofiduciary responsibility in writing

Retirement Plans

If you are a plan sponsor, your employees depend on you to make sure their retirement benefits are well managed and available when they need them. Your organization has a fiduciary obligation to manage its retirement plan with your employees' best interests in mind. In these times of heightened awareness of responsibility, you can depend on SHDR-IA as an acknowledged cofiduciary to guide you through prudent investment processes and provide you with a sound basis for investment decisions.

Defined benefit plan sponsors assume all responsibility for making investment decisions and generating income to cover present and future pension obligations. With these concerns in mind, the first step for any prudent plan sponsor is to assess their current funding and investment policies and determine if they are adequate for the future. Your SHDR-IA adviser can help you develop and manage appropriate policies using Asset Liability Modeling.

We begin with a thorough analysis of your most recent actuarial valuation. Using this information, we model growth in liabilities and assets. Analyzing the variability of the plan's funded status, market value of assets, and contributions across thousands of capital market possibilities, we examine the future effects capital market scenarios will have on a selected series of asset mixes, including your current mix. We recommend the appropriate asset mix after analysis of total plan costs, both current and future.

The analysis accomplishes these crucial objectives:

• Determine plan liability increase or decrease
• Identify a range of likely outcomes and risk parameters for various asset mixes
• Present solutions to mitigate risks
• Forecast future financial effects of optimal asset allocation and funding strategies
• Create asset allocation strategy based on financial goals
• Establish plan expectations for the future

Board members of foundations and endowments must be good stewards of their institution's investments. With the financial health of the institution top of mind, the first step is to assess current spending and investment policies to determine if they provide a sound basis for the success of the organization. An appropriate asset allocation policy should reflect the right level of risk for the fund given the cash inflows from various sources as well as specific spending needs. Your SHDR-IA adviser can help you develop and manage the right policies using Asset Spending Analysis.

We conduct a comprehensive analysis of your asset allocation, managers, spending requirements and expected contributions. Using this information, we model the spending pattern with the potential growth in assets across thousands of capital market possibilities, examine the future effects capital market scenarios will have on a selected series of asset mixes, including your current mix, and finally recommend the appropriate asset mix.

The analysis accomplishes these crucial objectives:

• Identify affect of spending policy changes
• Present a range of likely outcomes and risk parameters for various asset mixes
• Present solutions to mitigate risks
• Forecast future financial effects of optimal asset allocation and funding strategies
• Select an asset allocation strategy based on financial goals
• Establish fund expectations for the future

In today's environment, retirement plan sponsors and other investment stewards must pay close attention to their fiduciary responsibilities. As a sponsor, you are obligated to put the interests of participants first, offer well diversified investment alternatives, control plan expenses, provide constant oversight, and avoid prohibited transactions and conflicts of interest. While your fiduciary committee likely monitors your plan, a regular third-party evaluation is prudent to help you avoid mistakes and therefore costly penalties and potential legal action.

Your SHDR-IA adviser can make recommendations to help keep your plan in compliance with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), address plan shortfalls, reduce liability, improve management practices, and enhance the quality of plan investment options. A Fiduciary Review provides foundations and endowments an objective review of their operations and the management of their trusts and other assets.

The SHDR-IA Fiduciary Review process is designed to make you a successful investment fiduciary. Your SHDR-IA adviser will:

• Help you define investment goals and strategy
• Review your Investment Policy Statement for consistency with objectives
• Document investment selection process and check for deviations from process
• Research investment performance relative to peers, benchmarks and indices
• Analyze investment expenses relative to industry averages
• Document management and communication of expenses
• Provide roadmap for documenting and monitoring investment processes
• Educate investment committee members on fiduciary issues

SHDR-IA understands that a key objective of plan sponsors is to identify top-performing portfolio managers. And we also recognize the difficulty organizations may have in identifying such managers. In order to help you make the right selections, SHDR-IA conducts exhaustive research of the entire universe of managers available.

We conduct detailed analysis using proprietary processes to identify top-performing portfolio managers and to understand why they consistently beat the market before we make any recommendations to you. Our recommendations are objective and based on merit and fit, never on relationships.

The search and selection process involves these steps:

• Eliminating managers based on minimum thresholds
• Identifying managers who outperform their peers
• Analyzing performance, including rolling returns, risk-adjusted returns, and up/down market performance
• Evaluating top performers to determine why they consistently outperform

In today's environment, investment and plan expenses are a primary area of contention. Retirement plan sponsors, foundations and endowments are facing tightening scrutiny and increasing threats of litigation. Investment committees are under more pressure than ever to monitor and report investment expenses to participants and regulators alike. To successfully meet these demands, you need the help of a trusted investment adviser.

Since its inception, SHDR-IA has been alert to the affect expenses have on the total return of a portfolio. When we recommend managers, we always weigh the expense of the investment. We also provide Plan and Investment Expense Analysis of existing portfolios as part of a comprehensive portfolio review or as a stand-alone project. Should regulators inquire, this type of prudent analysis helps to show proper intent on the part of your investment committee to fulfill their obligations.

Plan and Investment Expense Analysis includes these important items:

• Identification of all plan and/or investment expenses
• Detailed reporting of all plan and/or investment expenses
• Documentation of the source and destination of each dollar
• Calculation of the investment expense percentage