When the chef plates a meal, they usually send it out and are never seen again.
However, providing an investment portfolio is an ongoing issue. The deposit will come in. The drawer disappears. As the market moves, asset classes grow and shrink. Rebalancing is done regularly.
All of this requires daily trading. And buying and selling of this securities is one of the most complex and highly regulated parts of our business.
So, the first two parts of this series cover the recipes and ingredients behind the investment, but our final course focuses on teams and technology for every transaction.
What happens when you press “Deposit”?
Cara Daly is an adventurer of the heart. Avid surfer and daughter of a flight attendant, she chases the waves of Ireland and accumulates air miles to visit her family.
Naturally, she is drawn to Capital Markets, one of the more thrilling roles in the investment team. While the daily market is open, Cara and Team monitor the action to ensure that your orders go smoothly.
These transactions can reach hundreds of millions of dollars in a day, and the system that runs them all is our secret source in many ways. It is a custom build (a rare in the industry) and serves as mission control.
For example, when a customer clicks “Deposit,” the single click translates into a series of purchases. These are then combined into other purchases of the same kind, converted to orders, and then executed at calibrated intervals as part of a managed trading strategy.
This kind of intentional transaction is extremely important for the scale of our operations. With over $56 billion in assets under management, he has become the largest independent robo-advisor. We cannot “make” markets, but our trading volumes are large enough to potentially affect them. Therefore, you need to be aware of how and how the transaction is carried out.
“Suppose the market is trading $10 million in hypothetical security on a given day,” says Kara. “If a customer happens to want $20 million, meeting all that demand without worrying about a bigger context can boost prices.”
To navigate these implementation challenges, deploy multiple strategies as needed (see below for some examples), and each is continuously evaluated and coordinated. Overall, they help ensure that your purchases and sales are treated fairly in the market.
- You’ll be waiting for the first 30 minutes after the market opens before you start trading. This will help you avoid some of the common volatility at the beginning of the day.
- Trade regularly throughout the day and randomize when customer orders are processed. It is not desirable that it consistently affects one customer, as prices can roughly correlate with a particular time of the day.
- If you easily limit “system-generated” transactions (e.g., proactive rebalancing) for a particular fund, and the transaction reaches a certain threshold compared to the average daily volume. This helps you to ensure that you can continue regardless of “user-oriented” transactions (when a customer makes a deposit or withdrawal, with some examples).
- We partner with industry experts like Apex to route and execute orders across multiple companies, helping them stay at the forefront of evolving market conditions. Access to various run venues can also help you find the most advantageous term for your client, whether it’s price, speed, or overall run quality.
Switching gear from execution to tax optimization means that most asset classes use both primary and secondary funds. These backup “tickers” act during periods of increased volatility in the market. The moment when you can create or break an investment strategy.
Extends stress testing for market volatility
Often it is business as usual in our capital market team, and it is by design.
But when trading volumes actually rise during extreme volatility, and prices can sway wildly from time to time, it all becomes a deck. Cara and the company monitor our trading system for signs that additional monitoring may be required. They may ease new bottlenecks in real time and sometimes participate in supporting our trading engineering team.
Cara Daly (left) helps to ensure that your customers’ daily transactions go smoothly.
For example, take a look at April 2025. Earlier in the month, the Trump administration caught investors off guard and announced a string of tariffs much earlier than expected. The inconsistent messaging of the announcement and subsequently caused a few weeks of trade in the wild. Prices on some securities were cratered in the morning, only to recover by the end of the morning.
Not only did our system overcome this storm, we also used it to use the time window to collect tens of millions of dollars in time-consuming customer losses before prices recover. This tax loss harvesting strategy helps to sprinkle tax benefits on some of the client’s taxable investments, and is not possible without the help of the aforementioned secondary litickers. These funds help you avoid “washing sales” while maintaining the desired exposure and risk level of customers.
Delicious food is boiling
The image of Golden Harvest is appropriate. This series considers examining the work of the investment team through the culinary lens. Many of our customers come to us to plant seeds for independent, long-term wealth, not necessarily for one revenue. Harvest to support a more fulfilling life.
Cara and other capital market experts are a big part of their lifecycle and are leaning towards thousands of daily transactions that optimize your portfolio over and over. This is the beauty of using technology as a tool to expand its unique capabilities and deliver results at scale. It’s a people-driven process.
We have become trusted leaders in automated money management, not for our technology, but for those who build and use it every day. Experts like Cara, Josh and Jamie are our secret elements and are committed to serving our clients who are hungry for better ways to invest.
Bon Apettite.
