Evli Atlas

custom. designed. portfolios

Asset management for the modern age. Enabling unique preferences in personally tailored portfolios.

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What is Evli Atlas?

Evli Atlas is a service built for designing and implementing customized equity portfolios.

We help clients design portfolios that match their unique investment preferences.

Clients can design modified versions of any investment style imaginable. ESG considerations can be integrated to any desired extent. Carefully selected portfolio construction methods enable portfolios that serve their purpose.

Join us in the custom indexing revolution, a rapidly growing trend in asset management, that emphasizes investor uniqueness.

Every investor is different. Our technology enables portfolios that reflect that reality.

Customize any part of your equity allocation

Active Investments

adjust any investing style to your liking
take into account your ESG target
customize your investment universe
construct a portfolio with the balance of conviction and diversification you prefer

Enchanced passive investments

We can tune up a passive index to have:

ESG considerations fitted to your needs
a tilt towards rewarded factors or any investment style
a more suitable diversification method

ESG investments

We can provide an alternative to an existing ESG strategy and provide:

the ESG profile that is perfectly in line with your targets
neutralize the undesired risk exposures and/or tilt towards rewarded factors
improve the diversification

Modern reporting

Get relevant, timely & interactive reporting. As much information, data and analysis as needed. Choose what data you want to track – we provide it.

Various levels of customization needs

Fully customized

Take full control of your portfolio. Determine your customized investment univere, rebalancing rules, and everything in between. Just let us take care of the implementation and reporting.

Assembled

Build your portfolio using themes and building blocks we have curated. Pick your mix of ESG, investment styles and portfolio construction methods to get the type of portfolio you have been looking for.

Calibrated

Choose a portfolio template from our existing library or let us compile one for you. Apply your personal finishing touch.

Under the hood

We have originally built a large portion of the Atlas software for managing our family of factor-themed mutual funds, starting in 2015.

There are a few fairly standard requirements for running a quantitative investment strategy.

Data

First, we need to have data on the stocks in the investment universe. We combine different types of data sources and map and match them all to the underlying companies in question. The data includes fundamental data reported by the company, stock market data, ESG data curated by third party analysts, etc. Really any (alternative) data source could be linked to our data platform, provided it can be linked to the universe of tradeable stocks.

Transforming the data into meaningful metrics

Second, we need to transform the raw data to meaningful measures that are useful in constructing portfolios. The majority of these measures have to do with the two basic dimensions of investing -- expected return or risk. This is where the company’s fundamental data gets crunched into quality measures, where market price action gets converted into momentum metrics, and where different ESG-datapoints divide companies into the responsible ones and the ones that are perhaps at odds with the investor’s principles of responsible investing.

This is one of the more intriguing areas of the process. And one that we are constantly working on evolving, by digesting new ideas, be it an ESG-straregy from the latest academic research or testing the new potential alternative datasource.

Constructing the portfolio

Next, we need to have the portfolio construction pipeline to convert the data into a meaningful portfolio of stocks. The importance of this part if often overlooked. Even using the same metrics to construct a portfolio corresponding to a certain investment style can result in portfolios with vastly different characteristics. Here the key is to understand the investors’ preference well enough to know, which risks they care about and which not so much. Is the investor agnostic about active risk against the market portfolio or do they have a tight tracking error budget? Is the investor happy to bet a higher portion of the portfolio on the small cap-companies or are they constrained to large caps? Do they prefer more defensive portfolio or are they ready to ride the ups and downs of the market? Knowing the investors’ preferences, we just need to take care to have a deep enough box of portfolio construction tools, and be able come up with the right ones for each situation.

Trading and reporting

Last, but not least we have the engine that turns these portfolios into lists of trades for us to execute, as well as relevant and timely reports for the investors to monitor the progress. The ability to efficiently execute trades is an obvious prerequisite to actually running the portfolios. But we also find it extremely important for us to be able to provide clients with info about how all of the choices made in constructing the portfolio, are affecting the risk and returns. We need to be able to tell, for instance in case of a small cap quality portfolio with an ESG twist, how each of the components is affecting the portfolio. A sector allocation attribution analysis doesn’t cut it, as it is just a somewhat trivial byproduct of the actual choices that went into the porftolio.

Constructing Portfolios with Evli Atlas

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Define the investment universe

We start off by defining the investment universe. This could be any third party index, or a modification thereof. We could only include a subset defined by geography, market value of the company, or any measurable characteristic, to match the investor’s area of focus.

Apply screening filters

Find your investment style

Once we have defined our screened investment universe, we will define our investment style or return drivers. We have gone through a lot of material and tried to sort out robust return drivers that have a clear rationale for working and have a demonstrated history of providing excess returns in different market environments. While we have concentrated on traditional academic factors in our previous products, we do not feel the need to limit ourselves to that particular subset. Instead, we have tried to curate a list of return drivers that would include as many different styles of investing as possible. We have also compiled these return drivers into themes that make it easier to choose the appropriate mix of return drivers.

Construct the portfolio

The last very important step is to convert all the previous selections into a tradeable portfolio of stocks. Are the stocks assigned weights relative to their market value, are they equal weighted, halfway in between, or something completely different? How often are the signals updated and portfolio rebalanced? Is there a tracking error target or a cap on turnover? These (and many more) questions get answered in the last phase to yield the kind of portfolio profile that the client needs.

Equity portfolios matched to your unique preferences

Sustainability

Reach your organization`s sustainability targets. Sustainability can be incorporated via screening, integration and thematic investments.

Return drivers

Harvest the return drivers that you believe in.

Portfolio design

Design smarter portfolios than simple indices. Key decisions in portfolio design are investment universe, benchmark emphasis and diversification.

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Why Evli ?

Dedicated and systematic investment team

Access to Evli`s ESG experience and team

Strong expertise in managing sustainable factor funds since 2015.