"Managing expectations is the key to investment success."

Brian Portnoy, Virtus Investment Partners' [profile] new vice president and director of investment education, shared that perspective recently with MFWire. Portnoy, a Mesirow and Chicago Equity Partners alumnus who once served on Morningstar mutual fund analyst team, joined Virtus a month ago with a mandate to "throw a lasso around the really massive amount of insight and information that we have under the Virtus roof."

"We see the importance of educational initiatives in driving better client outcomes, for financial advisors and individual investors," Portnoy tells MFWire. "We're not just looking to write academic treatises about good decision-making or about markets. Part of the task at hand is communicating what those solutions are and how they might be appropriate for certain advisors solving certain problems."

Decision-making issues are an area of particular interest to Portnoy. Earlier this year he published a book, The Investor's Paradox: The Power of Simplicity in a World of Overwhelming Choice.

Virtus has 17 affiliates and subadvisors, Portnoy notes, which puts the publicly-traded asset manager "in an especially good position to have plenty of interesting insights for the investing public." Now he's trying to figure out what resources he needs internally and externally to build out his educational and communication efforts.

"It's a pretty blank sheet of paper that we're working with," Portnoy says. 

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