Did you know Zephyr Associates collects narrative information in the Zephyr Managed Accounts Database? This information comes standard with your Zephyr subscription and is available to all of our subscribers. Participating managers provide information on firm history, buy/sell discipline, portfolio construction process, and many other firm- and product-level fields.

The best pre-built template to view this information can be found in the Template Library. In StyleADVISOR, if you were to open the Task Wizard and scroll down to the folder called “Zephyr Defined Templates” and then the subfolder “Detailed Analysis”, you should see a template called “RV Single Manager Fact Sheet (Zephyr SMA)”. By opening this template you will see a nice, finished template that will show both Zephyr analytics and the narratives provided by participating managers.

There is one caveat with this information, however. In order to view it, you must be running the SQL-version of the Zephyr databases. There are two database structures StyleADVISOR utilizes. The old-fashioned one is called BTRIEVE and isn’t too robust. The newer, SQL version allows us to pack massive amounts of data (like big narrative write-ups) in to the database. If you were to open up this file and see blank fields, that might mean you do not have the SQL database. If you need more help understanding the difference between SQL and BTRIEVE databases, feel free to call our support team at 800-789-5323.