RIA custodian platform Altruist has launched personalized direct indexing with over 44 filters for advisors to dictate investment preferences for individual clients, coming four years after the startup debuted its direct indexing offering for large-cap stocks.
Altruist carries a $2,000 investment minimum for personalized indexing which is significantly lower than industry counterparts, such as Schwab’s $100,000 minimum for a personalized indexing separately managed account. The latest update expands Altruist’s personalized indexing across “all global equity markets,” head of investments Adam Grealish told InvestmentNews.
“Advisors can select a core direct index, say US large cap, all cap, international, and take that through a workflow that they can do themselves or with clients where they're personalizing across sector, industry and values and issues,” said Grealish. “So 44 different values and issues that they can exclude from their portfolio. It’s a really easy way in one or two clicks to deliver a faith-oriented equity portfolio.”
More than 5,900 independent advisors custody assets with Altruist, whose Hazel AI tax planning launch last month sparked an alleged selloff of legacy wealth management stocks. Altruist’s personalized indexing runs natively on its own platform rather than through an outside asset manager, letting advisors access direct indexing without separate subadvisory contracts, extra accounts, or an additional fee layer.
“We have fractional share capabilities, so this really means two big and meaningful things in the direct indexing space — investment minimums are 100 times less than industry norms. Our investment minimum is $2,000, we usually see them closer to $200,000 because we can hold fractions of shares, and not just full shares,” said Grealish. “It also has a positive impact on how close we are to track the underlying index. So tracking errors are generally lower because you don't have these lumpy whole share positions that can throw things off balance.”
As of 2024, 18% of advisors reported using direct indexing strategies, according to Cerulli. Direct indexing is viewed as being “essential” for serving high-net-worth clients by 59% of wealth industry professionals surveyed in MSCI’s 2026 Wealth Trends Report, particularly given the potential tax benefits of the strategy.
“This tends to work best for clients across two dimensions—one very tax sensitive clients or clients who have views around investing that they want to express,” said Grealish. “The third would be clients who have embedded legacy positions that the advisor needs to build around. So those are three client archetypes that we see advisors deploying a direct indexing strategy."
Advisors can use fractional share trading to implement client models to the dollar, rather than rounding to whole shares.
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