CLS Investments
Omaha, NE 68130
Phone: (402) 493-3313
Fax: (402) 493-2811
Articles by CLS Investments
Looking for the Next Netflix? Good Luck.
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments Netflix is an impressing stock. Despite some recent turbulence, its returns make even its FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google parent Alphabet) counterparts pale in comparison…
Ryan BeachChief Executive Officer
Ryan Beach serves as CEO of CLS Investments, LLC, where he oversees CLS’s Executive Team, Portfolio Managers, and Business Development. Before becoming CEO, Ryan served as President of CLS, where he led CLS’s general operations and management, as well as provided strategic direction to department heads. Ryan also serves as President of the AdvisorOne Funds, a series mutual fund trust. Prior to joining CLS, Ryan served as Associate General Counsel for NorthStar Financial Services Group, LLC (NorthStar) - CLS’s parent company.
Prior to joining NorthStar, Mr. Beach advised publiclytraded and privately-held clients in connection with corporate financings, mergers and acquisitions, and various corporate governance matters. Mr. Beach also regularly advised securities industry professionals in complying with requirements established by FINRA and the SEC.
Mr. Beach received his J.D., with distinction, from the University of Nebraska College of Law and earned a BA in Economics, with department honors, from Brigham Young University. He also holds the FINRA Series 65 license.
Joe Smith, CFASenior Market Strategist
Joe Smith specializes in quantitative research, risk management, and ETF due diligence. He serves as Senior Market Strategist for CLS AdvisorOne International Equity Fund, CLS Thematic Growth, and the CLS Core Plus ETF strategies.
Prior to joining CLS in 2015, Mr. Smith worked at Russell Investments where he served as an Analyst responsible for asset allocation research, portfolio construction, optimization design, and risk management research. He later joined Russell ETFs as Manager of ETF Product Development and Research, a role in which he developed quantitative indexing strategies implemented as ETFs. Mr. Smith also worked for Charles Schwab Investment Management as a Senior Product Specialist supporting product management activities for the Schwab ETFs fund family. In addition, he worked for CLS during the summer of 2014 as an Investment Analyst.
Mr. Smith received his Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the University of Washington. He later received his Master of Business Administration from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.
Mr. Smith holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and is a member of the CFA Society of San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Nebraska. He is also a member of the Society of Quantitative Analysts and the Quantitative Work Alliance for Applied Finance, Education and Wisdom.
Did you know? In grad school, Joe spent 40 days in nine countries.
Rusty Vanneman, CFAChief Investment Officer
Rusty Vanneman joined CLS in September 2012 as Chief Investment Officer. Previously, Mr. Vanneman was Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager at Kobren Insight Management (KIM) in the greater Boston area. His 11-year tenure at KIM included a 5-year span during which the firm was owned by E*TRADE Financial. During this time, Mr. Vanneman was the Senior Market Strategist for E*TRADE Capital. Prior to working at KIM, he was a Senior Analyst at Fidelity Management and Research (FMR Co) in Boston. He was also a Managing Analyst at Thomson Financial.
Mr. Vanneman received a Bachelor of Science in Management from Babson College, where he graduated with high distinction. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and is a member of the CFA Institute. He is also a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and a member of the Market Technicians Association (MTA).
More Articles
Demystifying Liquid Alternatives
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments One of our latest investment themes, Be Creative, emphasizes the use of alternative assets in portfolios. Alternatives is a broad and often confusing category of investments…
The Winds Are Changing for Active Management
By Rusty Vanneman, CFA, CMT, CLS Investments Chief Investment Officer Active management has had a bad rap in recent years, but I expect the winds are beginning to change and a period…
Do Active ETFs Outperform?
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments As I suggested in a previous post, active mutual fund managers, in aggregate, do show some ability to outperform — gross of fees — and if…
Strategic Versus Tactical Asset Allocation
By Rusty Vanneman, CFA, CMT, CLS Investments Chief Investment Officer Investors often ask, and for good reason, which asset allocation approach is best: strategic or tactical. The answer, like much in the…
Getting Active in 2018
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments Some of the most common New Year’s resolutions are to work out more, lose a few pounds, or just be more active in general. Despite…
What Multi-Factor ETFs & Active Managers Don’t Have in Common
By Joe Smith, CFA, CLS Investments Investors continue to focus on factor investing as more ETF issuers launch single and multi-factor ETFs that target risk premiums through rules-based indexing. Multi-factor ETFs…
10 Common Smart Beta ETF Questions
By Rusty Vanneman, CLS Investments At CLS Investments, we are heavy users of smart beta ETFs, so understanding smart beta is key to understanding CLS portfolios. Smart beta ETFs have become…
ETF Expense Ratios: More Than Meets the Eye
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments We’ve all got our pet peeves and soap boxes. For most people they have to do with human behavior. But for me, my biggest pet peeve…
Investors: Think Big by Going Small
By Joe Smith, CFA, CLS Investments Small-cap stocks have long offered investors opportunities to capture sizable gains either through index exposure or active management. The long-term excess return premium to small-caps…
There’s More to Being a Fiduciary Than Lowering Costs
By Rusty Vanneman, CLS Investments Being a fiduciary means acting in a client’s best interests. Striving for lower costs is part of being a fiduciary, but it’s not the only factor.…
3 Undervalued ETFs You’ve Never Heard Of
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments CLS Investments is a top 10 holder in more than 50 different ETFs, many of which are new (and potentially small), but well vetted strategies with…
The Market ≠The Dow
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments “The market is up 100 points today!” How often do you hear that comment? Some of my family members who have no market knowledge even referenced…
ETFs on TV and in the Financial Media
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments Over the July 4 holiday, I had the privilege of stepping away from the office for a while, and I found myself watching a lot of…
3 Strategic Reasons Advisors Should Adopt Factor-Based ETFs
By Joe Smith, CFA, CLS Investments Factor investing is all the rage, but many financial advisors are still unsure of its benefits. Factors such as value, momentum, size, minimum volatility, and…
How to Lose Money With Factors
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments Factors are powerful tools for managing risk and producing excess returns – a pretty consistent message across the financial blogosphere. However, after reviewing the data, it…
Should You Replace Your Active Manager with a Smart Beta ETF?
By Joe Smith, CFA, CLS Investments The rise of ETFs has generally come at the expense of active management, primarily via mutual funds. For years, active managers have been under…
6 Tips to Prepare for Falling Interest Rates
By Rusty Vanneman, CLS Investments The Federal Reserve (Fed) is predicting two more rate hikes in 2017, and that has many investors weighing the potential pros and cons of a rising…
Alternative ETFs: The Future is Bright
By Grant Engelbart, CLS Investments Currently, there is approximately $45 billion invested in alternative ETFs, according to Morningstar – just 2% of total ETF assets. Investors have been slow to adopt…
No-Transaction-Fee ETFs – A Cost/Benefit Review Suggests Higher Expected Returns
By Rusty Vanneman, CFA, CMT and Kostya Etus, CFA, CLS Investments The most well-known potential benefits of ETFs include: – Lower costs – Tax efficiency – Diversification – Stable market…
Correlation: The Missing Ingredient for Investors?
It is no secret that active management has been increasingly critiqued in recent years, and asset flows are following suit as investors move to passive products. One of the large…
Short-Term Rally in Global Markets Boosts Optimism Towards Equities
By Scott Kubie, CFA, CLS Investments Chief Strategist The recent short-term rally in global stock markets has boosted optimism towards equity investments. While always glad to see our clients benefiting…
Why Smart Beta ETFs Are Leading The New Investment Revolution
Our industry continues to undergo a deep transformation that is shaking the very foundation of investing. Over the past two decades, indexing has moved from an afterthought for many investors…
ETF Analysis: Don’t Forget Portfolio Turnover
Investment portfolio turnover is an important statistic to consider when analyzing an investment portfolio. This consideration should apply to all investment portfolios, whether they are actively or passively managed. First,…
Beware of Easy Trading in ETFs
Exchange traded funds (ETFs) continue to dominate cash flows into investor portfolios — and for very good reasons. But ETFs have one feature that is dangerous for many investors,…
Why Hasn’t Smart Beta Expanded into Emerging Markets?
Smart beta ETFs are all the rage at the moment and are capturing an increasingly large share of the ETF marketplace. Yet the growth hasn’t spread as rapidly into the…
How do Investing Risks Compare to Potential Rewards?
By Scott Kubie, CFA, CLS Investments Chief Strategist Advisors have a lot on their minds. In addition to worrying about regulators and a tendency to watch too much politically-slanted news,…
The Timing Game for Factor ETFs
By Joe Smith, CFA – CLS Investments Senior Market Strategist Are You Trying to Time Your Factor ETFs? The ability to time or rotate between a set of investment strategies can…
Making Sense of Commodity Exchange-Traded Products
By Grant Engelbart, CFA For hundreds of years, investors have been buying and selling commodities. In fact, sources point to the first commodity futures contract dating back to the 1600s!…
Overcoming Stock-to-Bond Ratios in Investing
By Scott Kubie, CFA, CLS Investments Chief Strategist On a beautiful fall day in 2002, I walked into a room of financial planning clients full of dread. I was about…
The Foibles of ETF Expense Ratios
By Grant Engelbart, CFA, CLS Portfolio Manager ETFs have seen explosive growth, in part due to lower overall costs and with some assistance from active managers underperforming for a number…
Income-Oriented ETF Portfolios Ripping it up Mid-Year
By Rusty Vanneman, CFA and Josh Jenkins, CFA At the mid-year checkpoint, income-oriented ETF portfolios are ripping it up. With a tailwind of lower interest rates and tighter credit spreads,…
Is Your Minimum Volatility ETF a Crowded Trade?
Note: This article is part of the ETF Trends Strategist Channel By Joe Smith, CFA So far in 2016, we’ve seen a large amount of net inflows into minimum-volatility ETFs as…
Is Your Bond Portfolio Riskier Than You Think?
Note: This article appears on the ETFtrends.com Strategist Channel By Scott Kubie, CFA How risky can bonds be? They have only declined in three of the last 23 years, as measured…
Factor Seasonality: Analyzing a Variety of Investing Behaviors
Note: This article appears on the ETFtrends.com Strategist Channel By Grant Engelbart, CFA Factors have become widely-agreed-upon drivers of risk and return, backed by academia and practitioners alike. Explanations for outperformance…
No, This is Not an Ugly Chart on Factor Investing
Note: This article appears on the ETFtrends.com Strategist Channel By Rusty Vanneman, CFA There’s a chart on factor investing that I love to use for investor presentations, but I’ve been cautioned…
An Equation to Identify the Next Market Bubble?
Note: This article appears on the ETFtrends.com Strategist Channel By Scott Kubie, CFA, CLS Chief Strategist Market bubbles occur when the price of an asset significantly deviates from its intrinsic value.…
The Bayesian View to Multi-Factor ETF Investing
Note: This article is part of the ETF Trends Strategist Channel By Joe Smith Multi-Factor Investing is on the Rise Multi-factor investing is an increasingly hot topic in the world of…
Do ETFs and Moving Averages Mix?
Note: This article is part of ETF Trends Strategist Channel. By Rusty Vanneman Do ETFs and Moving Averages Mix? The short answer is yes, they do. At CLS, the investment team* and I…
Can Beta be Smart?
Factors, multi-factors, smart beta, strategic beta, and whatever else you want to call non-market-cap-weighted investing is everywhere. I don’t think it is plausible to go one week without hearing mention…
Advisors Evolve in Use of Smart Beta ETFs
The day before the Republican primary debate in Houston, I participated on a panel at a smart beta symposium put on by S&P Dow Jones Indices. While our panel wasn’t…
Are Factor ETFs the Key to Unlocking Your Portfolio’s Risk DNA?
Factor Investing: Short-Term Fad or Long-Term Shift? “Is factor investing a fad or long-term trend?” That is the question many advisors and investors have wrestled with since the introduction and…
Trends in ETF Growth
Nearly $20 billion per month flowed into ETFs in 2015 ETFs are still only a dent in the roughly $16 trillion mutual fund industry ETFs continue to have lower expenses, tax…
Smart Beta ETFs: Creative Destruction in Action
ETFs are eating mutual funds’ lunch. And their breakfasts and their dinners. In 2015 alone, for example, ETFs had net inflows of $242B. Mutual funds had net outflows of $125B.…
What Does It Mean to Be an ETF Strategist?
The Evolution of ETFs ETFs have been an exceptional growth story in the investment management industry over the last 20+ years. From the days of the very first ETF, the…
When Growth Is Slow, What Matters to ETF Investors?
The global economic recovery is in its sixth year of growth. While the length of recovery has been impressive, the pace has been slower than previous recoveries. In periods of…