Investment Advisor Magazine has a review of four investment monitoring packages, Morningstar Advisor Workstation, Steele Systems Mutual Fund Expert, fi360, and Klein Fund Selection Tool. They don’t draw conclusions and, in fact, it seems like the products are only superficially competing for the same market. But it’s an interesting read nonetheless.

fi360 seems designed to create an investment policy statement (IPS) for an advisor’s clients, then monitor the client positions against a target model of funds, re-evaluating the IPS every year. They focus on tracking the fiduciary responsibility an advisor has towards the client.

The Morningstar Advisor, Steele and Klein solutions are focused on analyzing mutual funds then creating model portfolios for your clients. The review is unclear about whether they do any ongoing monitoring of the models but it sounds like no. The review doesn’t mention it but the Morningstar Advisor platform is much larger in scope and has a portfolio management module that (I assume) allows ongoing monitoring of the portfolios and target models.

The review concludes:

Klein [provides] a better way to select funds but does not prepare portfolio reports (that’s not their niche). fi360 provides a great tool for the fiduciary, Steele Systems provides great flexibility to customize your output, and Morningstar has the broadest menu of modules. Most, if not all, of the companies have a free trial period, so do your homework before purchasing.