Stephens Group Asset Management, LLC

Stephens Group Asset Management provides discretionary investment management and ERISA plan advisory services to individuals, retirement accounts, trusts, estates, charitable organizations, and corporate clients. The firm offers two primary portfolio offerings: proprietary ETF model strategies and a fixed-income only strategy, and it also provides ERISA fiduciary and non-fiduciary plan services as well as plan sponsor consulting and participant-level advice.

Investment decisions are implemented through the firm’s ETF models and a duration-focused fixed income approach grounded in the principals’ historical analysis of inflation and interest-rate relationships. Clients set authorized asset-allocation preferences and boundaries that SGAM follows when managing accounts; the brochure notes the firm generally does not otherwise tailor decisions to each client’s individual objectives, time horizon or other personal factors unless specifically agreed.

The firm manages roughly $1.7 billion in discretionary assets with a small advisory team, resulting in a relatively high AUM-per-advisor profile compared with peers. The brochure discloses receipt of non-cash benefits from its primary custodian (software, trading and back-office support from Schwab) and relationship-related benefits from a recordkeeper (Empower event attendance, accommodations and gift cards), and it describes policies such as declining to make rollover recommendations to address related conflicts of interest.