Background
The administration of funds covers many different types of financial activities. These activities include fund accounting, financial reporting, net asset value calculation, capital calls, distributions, investor communications, and many other activities.
These activities are applied to many different types of funds as well. The funds within the field are mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity funds, venture capital funds, and any other investment fund that pools resources together. These four steps are a basic introduction to everyday activities performed by companies involved with administering funds.
Identify Financial Goals
Any personal financial advisor will tell you that to create an investment portfolio; you will need to identify the goals of your portfolio. When identifying goals, you will look at potential time horizons, liquidity concerns, and potential returns, among many other things.
Relate Them To Your Administrator
A financial administrator will do the same assessment. If the administrator is working with a single client, they will help you work through and identify your goals. However, if the administrator is working with a fund pooling the resources of many different individuals, they must come up with some broad goals.
These goals are general on purpose because individuals must feel that their goals apply to the fund’s objectives. The fund will operate in the client’s best interest, but goals that are too specific could exclude many clients from wanting to invest in a particular fund.
Develop A Plan
The next step that a fund administrator must take is to develop an investment plan. Now that the fund’s or individual’s goals are set, an investment plan can be developed. This plan will be based on the goals of its clients.
For example, if a group of clients was more conservative investors, they would be more inclined to a mutual fund. However, if clients are more prone to risk, they may want to invest in a hedge fund.
Follow The Plan
The allocation of funds will include what sectors the investments will be placed into and what companies the money will be allocated to. This means that the administrator would need to identify which of the 11 sectors the funds would be allocated into, if not multiple sectors. Then, they would also have to detail which companies within those sector(s) that the money in the fund would be invested in.
Execute Investment Strategy
The execution of the investment strategy is relatively simple. The fund administrator just needs to put the plan that was developed into action. Most of the work for this step is done in the previous steps, but the fund administrator must identify value within the companies they are investing in. This means that they must buy in at the right times to provide the fund’s clients with the best deal.
Monitor Market Conditions
This step might be the most critical step of the entire fund administration process. This is because monitoring the market can be difficult depending on the number of investments you have within the fund. Each investment is likely to move in its unique way, which means that the administrator will have to evaluate each investment carefully.
Making sure that each investment aligns with the goals of the fund’s clients is extremely important. The administrator needs to make sure that the asset allocation remains consistent, and they need to report the fund’s results to its clients. Also, if the fund’s investment strategy changes or fund investments in different companies, the administrator must notify those who are a part of the fund.
Conclusion
Various companies work directly as fund administrators. One of the specific companies that work with hundreds of millions of dollars is Assure. If you do not feel comfortable managing your investment portfolio or need help identifying investment goals, seeking a company that works directly as a fund administrator would be a wise move.