[1]Investment firms are often evaluated, in part, according to their assets under management [2], or AUM. AUM is one measure of the trust investors have placed in a firm: the greater the AUM, the greater the trust. This page is designed to provide the same sort of information about SCLC [3] that is given by AUM. But it is crucial to emphasize, at our mention of this acronym so prevalent in the investment industry, that SCLC is not an asset manager. Mutual fund [4] companies, insurers, separate account managers, hedge funds, venture capital firms, private equity firms, and some private banks and trust companies are asset managers: they add client deposits to proprietary portfolios [5] that they market to many different investors, and in which they trade without prior authorization from their clients.
We take the opposite approach: we help and support our clients in the management of their own portfolios, and do not intervene in those portfolios without their prior approval. So, while we provide advice on assets currently valued at more than a billion dollars, we don’t “manage” them. Thus we would prefer to use the acronyms “AUS” and “AUC:” assets under supervision or consultation.
What is the difference between assets under supervision and assets under consultation? Simply that the former involves the continuous supervision of the assets in question, whereas the latter involves discontinuous, periodic provision of investment advice. A typical example of supervision would be our engagement to provide ongoing, continuous monitoring, reporting, back office services (e.g., trading, transfers, and the like), and on-call advice to a portfolio [6] owned by an individual investor. A typical example of consultation would be our engagement as investment advisor to a corporate retirement plan, to provide quarterly advice on the menu of investment options it offers to plan participants, including fund benchmarking, analysis, evaluation and recommendations.
Like most financial firms, SCLC was hit hard by the profound market crisis of late 2008 and early 2009. After many years of posting steady increases in assets under supervision and consultation, we saw both decline steeply during the crisis. The effect of falling markets on client portfolios was compounded by the liquidation of some of our largest corporate clients. Assets have since begun to recover. (Enlarge image) [7]