The Advantage to Having Your Trading System as Part of Your Portfolio Accounting Platform

As a country, it seems that we’re obsessed with buying gadgets that can help us save us time. How many times have you seen a television infomercial for an offer you simply can’t refuse, or that Facebook ad for the product that everybody swears by? Take this past holiday season’s must-have item: the Instant Pot. I bet there are more than a few still sitting in their box.

See, if you’re going to add something to your life that promises to save time, it has to be something you’ll actually use, and that means it needs to have lasting value.

This rule also applies when purchasing tools and products for your advisory firm. Trading and rebalancing is one activity that takes up a significant amount of work and hours. Adding Orion Eclipse™ as your trading and rebalancing system of choice can help you save time and also give you more confidence that your data is clean and accurate when you trade

Because it’s a part of Orion Connect, our portfolio accounting platform, Eclipse™ syncs data back and forth between systems to help ease the amount of data entry your team does and ensure consistency between your portfolio accounting and trading platforms.

Today we’ll look at the top reasons why it’s an advantage to have your trading system be part of your portfolio accounting platform.

Portfolio Accounting and Trading Integrations: An Overview

If you’ve known Orion for any length of time, you know that our platform is designed to integrate with others, including various trading platforms.

In a typical trading integration, you’ll set up a schedule for relevant data to sync from your Orion platform to your trading system. Usually this is a once daily sync that happens after reconciliation has updated your portfolios for the day. It’s automated, and after you set it up, you only need to verify it’s complete before you start trading for the day.

Orion User Tip: Use the Interface Reconciliation app to confirm that your reconciliation is complete each day.

In a typical trading integration, data won’t sync back from your trading platform to Orion Connect. What this means is that if you update or maintain models in your trading system, but want to report on them in Orion, you have to maintain them in two systems.

Eclipse™ alleviates the pain of maintaining trading information in separate systems with a two-way data sync.

How Eclipse™ Syncs to Orion Connect

Eclipse™ is the only integration that uses two-way sync functionality so that certain data sets updated in Eclipse™ can flow back to Orion Connect.

Because models maintained in Eclipse™ sync back to Orion Connect, you can assign and report on all of your models without losing any data integrity or spending additional time to verify a match between the two systems.

Also, if you are trading at a Household or Asset Class level, your model’s target allocation data is also synced back from Eclipse™.

Let’s look at an example of target allocation data and how it can affect reporting.

If you have a household with a target allocation of 40% equity large cap, 30% international stocks, and 30% bonds, and you don’t use Eclipse™, you will need to ensure that you maintain a model with that specific allocation balance so you can use Orion’s Current vs Target Portfolio Model allocation reports and let clients know how their portfolio compares to the model they’ve selected.

If you do maintain models in Eclipse™, however, you can include a client’s actual target allocation in reporting instead of taking additional steps to manually set it up and track it on those critical target vs. current allocation reports.

What Data Orion Connect Syncs to Eclipse™

Orion Connect also syncs data to Eclipse™. When you’re working in Eclipse™, you’ll find some of the most important information you need for trading is already loaded and ready so you won’t duplicate efforts between systems.

1. Product Classifications

Data syncs to Eclipse™ on a scheduled sync to import full data—from households to tax lots to often overlooked product classifications.

The product classification sync is important because it ensures that how you report assets to clients matches exactly with how you trade them. Keeping classifications in sync between a portfolio accounting and trading integration can cost your team a lot of time and headaches, but with Eclipse™, it matches.

2. Systematics

The two-way sync also includes a notification that you have an upcoming systematic, such as a monthly distribution from a custodian, in an account. These notifications help to keep your team up-to-date on what’s happening in any given account.

3. SMA Account

Eclipse™ can see and utilize accounts you’ve marked as SMA accounts in Orion. As an example, you may have a household with three retirement accounts, and a 401k. In Orion, you can mark that 401k account as an SMA because it can’t be traded by your team. Eclipse™ will see this, and won’t trade it.

Even when marked as SMA, though, the account will still sync to Eclipse™ and the system will take it into consideration for modeling purposes. This means your clients can get the most appropriate trades for their overall portfolio, even when you have one account that won’t be traded. Other trades that the system calculates will be adjusted knowing it can’t trade the SMA account.

4. Trading Instructions

If an account is trade blocked, that information syncs over as well. Eclipse™ has many features beyond the data sync with Orion Connect that can add efficiency and scale to your firm’s trading process such as:

  • Bringing tax alpha to your firm
  • Trading at a portfolio level
  • Implementing FIX for straight-through processing
  • And much more

Want to see more of Eclipse™? Register for one of our bi-weekly demos held each Tuesday and Thursday. Click here to see our list of upcoming events.

0158-OAS-3/23/2018

About Jared Jollensten
Jared Jollensten serves as a Trading Product Manager for Orion’s Trading team. Jared was born and raised in Nebraska and won’t be caught rooting for any team other than the Huskers.