Orion Offers Lineup Of Fixed-Income SMAs

Orion Advisor Solutions is launching a series of fixed income separately managed account strategies on its Orion Portfolio Solutions (OPS) platform today.

“We’ve just had so much demand for fixed income and Orion has had so much demand from their advisors for fixed income now that interest rates have gone up as high as they have that it made a lot of sense to start offering these strategies across the OPS platform,” said Joshua Flade, deputy chief investment officer at Orion.

The firm introduced six strategies, Flade said.

“We create diversified, low-turnover, high-conviction, fixed-income portfolios,” he said. “We do that in such a way while trying to mitigate interest rate risk, liquidity, concentration risk, and largely to generate cash flow for our investors.” 

The six strategies are Orion Short Duration Government Bond, Orion Government Bond, Orion Short Duration Investment Grade Bond, Orion Investment Grade Bond, Orion Investment Grade Municipal bond, and Orion High Yield Corporate Bond.

The strategies were originally part of Townsquare Capital before Orion acquired the firm and rebranded it as Orion OCIO (Orion Outsourced Chief Investment Officer). 

“Previously, these fixed income SMAs have only been available to Orion’s OCIO clients where advisors have used the solutions to effectively scale their business,” said Ryan Beach, president of Orion Wealth Management. “Now, we’re pleased to bring these SMAs to a much broader community of financial advisors at OPS.”

The latest move follows Orion’s announcement in April that it was partnering with Blackrock to offer several of its fixed income SMAs on the OPS platform. The new strategies complement those of BlackRock, Flade explained.

The firm elected to go with SMAs as opposed to other investment vehicles because of the control advisors have compared with mutual funds, Flade said.

“The nice thing with SMAs is you have complete control over what the portfolio is going to look like as far as the allocation goes and you have control over whether or not to sell those bonds,” he said. “We think there’s going to be a lot of demand for investors to be able to lock in higher yields for longer through these SMAs.”