Firm Overview

Alesco Advisors LLC is an independent, employee-owned, SEC-registered investment advisor (RIA). Founded in January 2000, Alesco set out to change the landscape of the investment management business, where issues such as conflicts of interest, overly risky portfolios, high costs, and poor performance have plagued the industry for decades. Now, after 20 years, our focus and expertise as an independent, index-centric RIA is both significant and unique within the industry.

Alesco’s emphasis on SERVICE, INTEGRITY, and VALUE guides our client-first ethos. Each employee embraces the importance of honesty and doing what is right for our clients. We strive to provide superior investment advice and to add value through our service, our focus on net results, and our commitment to provide an independent perspective of the marketplace.

We work with both institutional and individual clients, including foundations and endowments, defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plans, corporate taxable accounts, trusts, IRAs, and individual taxable accounts.

The firm strives to minimize potential conflicts of interest. Our compensation is fee-based only. We do not offer any proprietary funds and we do not accept financial incentives to use investment offerings from product or service providers. Additionally, we do not accept “soft dollar” payments from brokerage and custodial firms. We believe these practices can result in conflicts between the investment advisor and the client. Accordingly, our interests are aligned with those of our clients.

Our Philosophy

Alesco’s philosophy focuses on asset allocation, the primary driver of investment returns. We concentrate on establishing appropriate asset class weightings, obtaining optimal diversification, reducing risks and costs, and rebalancing client portfolios as capital market prices change.

Our core investment philosophy embraces the findings of numerous academic and industry studies. This research indicates the majority of active investment managers do not outperform their benchmarks over time. Moreover, there is no persistency in the performance of active managers (i.e., managers who have performed favorably in the past are no more likely than other managers to perform favorably in the future). Therefore, Alesco rarely uses active investment managers when structuring client portfolios. Instead, we prefer index-centric investment vehicles. This philosophy allows us to eliminate many common investment risks and mistakes. Our efforts focus on proper asset allocation, broad diversification, and keeping costs low.