What’s Ahead:
- Recent equity market dislocations are giving investors little time to act, taking place over days, not months or quarters.
- The SNAP and SNIP Structured Note SMA Strategies are designed and managed for the investment needs of financial advisors and their clients.
- Expert allocation techniques, opportunistic execution timing, trade customization, and economies of scale are just some of the strategies’ advantages.
Equity volatility events happen quickly these days. Doesn’t it feel like market drops and recoveries occur in the blink of an eye? Indeed, the “buy the dip” mentality appears to be alive and well across the investor spectrum. For the retail crowd, however, it’s easy to get shaken out of a financial plan when market volatility strikes.
News around trade policy, taxes, the burgeoning national debt, and constant “stagflation” chatter can be worrisome, to say the least. In this backdrop of frothy equity valuations, fast stock market dips, and spiky volatility trends, a static or passive allocation to equities often doesn’t suffice. Many sophisticated financial advisors are coming to the same conclusion. They are on the hunt for strategies that combine differentiated risk management with the potential for excess return—true alpha generation.
The NewEdge Investment Solutions Structured Note Advisory Portfolio (SNAP) and Structured Note Income Portfolio (SNIP) Strategies, powered by Halo’s industry-leading Structured Note platform, are designed to deliver on these needs.
These Structured Note separately managed accounts (SMAs) seek to provide more than just downside protection; they aim to achieve positive strategy returns, even in environments where broader (equity) markets may struggle. Potentially more interesting than the “what” the strategies do, is the “how” they do it. The strategies are tactical, targeting volatility events to layer on exposure and during bullish markets, risk is proactively managed. When skillfully executed, SNAP and SNIP can add measurable excess risk-adjusted returns—“alpha” in portfolio management parlance. Let’s double-click on that today.
The Power of Tactical and Opportunistic Investing
Defined-outcome products are having a moment. The exchange-traded fund (ETF) space is bursting at the seams with funds catering to people seeking risk management and stability. While financial products with a variety of investment objectives are now available, they all have one detractor in common: they are largely static (passive) in their process. Buffered ETFs often rely on fixed issuance cycles and mechanical rollovers. While predictable, this approach ignores a simple reality that investors feel viscerally: equity markets can fall fast.
Sudden volatility jumps and market dislocations emerge and fade in a matter of days or weeks (it used to be months or quarters), creating fleeting opportunities to lock in enhanced Structured Note terms.
The SNAP and SNIP strategies’ active management process doesn’t rely on this suboptimal “set-it-and-forget-it” maxim. With NewEdge’s dedicated professional management team at the helm, the strategic aim is to capitalize on rapidly changing market conditions, whether driven by troubling economic data, earnings weakness, or political uncertainty. Tactical agility is their operational alpha, and when you combine their discipline with the speed and flexibility of Halo’s Structured Noteplatform, the strategies are well positioned to act on those brief moments to play offense.
Four Ways Professional Structured Note Management Creates Value
Expert oversight with SNAP and SNIP extends beyond opportunistic investing. It operates across multiple dimensions that work together to improve client outcomes. Let’s flesh them out so you better understand what’s happening under the hood.
- Opportunistic Execution Timing
Can you believe the current bull market has been ongoing for three years now? Stocks bottomed in October of 2022 after a multimonth, stairstep lower, driven down by a multiples reset among technology stocks and what may turn out to have been the most severe bond bear market of our lifetimes. But the road to new all-time highs in the S&P 500 and even global equities has not been smooth. Volatility seems to come out of nowhere.
When investor fear rises fast, whether due to earnings surprises, geopolitical headlines, or macroeconomic events, we expect to see options market volumes heat up while equity markets gyrate.
NewEdge actively scans the investment landscape for these market-driven developments, positioning portfolios to capture favorable entry points. Instead of passively accepting the terms available at predetermined rollover dates, SNAP and SNIP can strike when conditions are most advantageous.
- Underlying Asset Selection
Alpha potential isn’t just about when you invest, but also where. By identifying investment opportunities in equity sectors and/or indexes, NewEdge selects Structured Note underlying assets with the potential for better relative performance or more favorable terms. This approach opens the door to targeted exposures that generic index-linked Notes or buffered ETFs can’t replicate.
This is where in-depth research on intermarket relationships, relative strength trends, earnings momentum, and valuation come into play. There may also be a preference for small caps over large caps, or U.S. over international. Top-down and bottom-up analysis can go a long way toward managing risk and boosting returns over time.
- Trade Customization
Halo’s competitive marketplace platform fosters the creation of unique and timely allocations, which presents a clear advantage over off-the-shelf products. NewEdge’s portfolio managers can procure precise participation rates, protection levels, and underlying baskets based on real-time market conditions and alpha opportunities. They don’t show their cards, so to speak, like buffered funds do.
This on-the-fly customization means the SMAs aren’t confined to issuing on a rigid schedule with standardized terms; instead, they’re built to capture as much risk-adjusted return as the market allows.
Specifically, SNAP and SNIP allocations adjust dynamically. Through the Halo platform, NewEdge designs Notes on demand by:
- Choosing the underlying assets that align with a broader investment thesis.
- Setting maturities and call features that fit current conditions.
- Adjusting protection thresholds utilizing historical index data and forward expectations.
- Utilizing HALO’s real-time indicative trade quotes to gauge expected upside terms of a given trade.
In practice, this means taking advantage of market dislocations instantly, rather than waiting for the next monthly or quarterly offering.
- Economies of Scale
While point four gets into the transactional weeds, it’s crucial to understanding where value-add comes from. By executing trades at the strategy level (often resulting in trades of at least $10 million or more), SNAP and SNIP benefit from economies of scale that most individual RIAs or advisors and their clients can’t access. Larger notional sizes minimize the fixed costs of note issuance and encourage big-bank issuers to bid more competitively, which can result in higher coupons, deeper downside buffers, or both.
This edge, along with the other three advantages, makes Structured Note SMAs well worth their cost, not to mention the time that many advisors can claw back compared to running a Note allocation on their own. There’s also no fretting about missing those short-lived opportunities in markets—NewEdge handles it all.
Portfolio Management in Action: The Early-August 2025 Volatility Event
These aren’t just talking points; they describe recent trade activity initiated by the NewEdge portfolio management team. Let’s go back to August 1, 2025. That morning, the U.S. jobs report hit the tape, and it was a doozy. The headline employment gain was less than expected, but the real story was the sharp downward revision to the May and June payrolls numbers. Some 258,000 jobs were slashed from those two months, a large sum.
The labor market report stunned investors, causing the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) to soar from a stable 15 to a jittery 21. Later in the session, President Trump announced he directed his team to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), just as Adriana Kugler, a voting member on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), confirmed she would step down.
While traders were scrambling to absorb it all and market indices declined, NewEdge stayed cool and was hard at work executing two SNIP strategy yield trades. Here’s how it all unfolded and why it worked out well for investors in the SMA:
- Economies of Scale: Each trade exceeded $10 million in size, creating a competitive issuer auction and forcing issuers to sharpen their bids.
- Timing Advantage: Just two days before the jobs report (when the VIX resided at 15), preliminary auctions showed yields roughly 100 basis points (1%) lower than the final yield terms achieved during the heightened volatility event. So, the fear-gauge spike created instant pricing power and trade alpha compared to the potential trade just a couple days prior.
- Auction Dynamics: The average Note yield improved by 50 basis points (0.50%) in just two days, with the best yield improvement from a single issuer being +1.60%. While the winning issuer showed a rather strong level during the preliminary auctions, to win the trades they also improved yield by 1.20%. Patience paid off.
- Outcome: One of the trades, with a standard SPX/RTY/NDX yield structure, was executed at a 12.10% gross yield. Because this is a fairly common yield trade structure, the NewEdge SNIP portfolio manager compared the yield to available calendar offerings and remarked that the SNIP trade level was notably stronger than those available through broad off-the-shelf distribution platforms at the time.
Calendar Offerings vs. Tactical Execution
To be clear, calendar offerings, which are standard in Structured Note issuance, have a place in the market. They’re straightforward, predictable, and easy to access for those who prefer the DIY method. But that simplicity and convenience often comes at a cost. Namely, leaving the potential for enhanced returns on the table. The early-August SNIP trade case study is a great example of this.
For advisors and their clients this difference is real. Over a multiyear investment horizon, consistently capturing incremental yield or improved protection can compound into a meaningful performance gap. While the time savings and reduced stress of leaving the mechanics and management to the NewEdge experts is tougher to quantify, studies show that a majority of advisors believe that their time is best spent fostering stronger client relationships, making this time savings potentially even more valuable than the enhanced returns that can be generated.
The Structured Note SMA Brass Tacks for Advisors
RIAs looking to access the Structured Note space have options, but not all of them are created equal. The NewEdge Structured Note Strategies, through the partnership of NewEdge’s team and Halo’s platform, bring together:
- Expert tactical management to exploit momentary market opportunities by being proactive, not reactive.
- A full spectrum of customization to match terms with clients seeking protective investments and uncorrelated returns.
- The purchasing power of scale to secure more favorable issuer terms based on a real-time opportunity set, not a generic calendar template.
- A disciplined, repeatable process designed to capture alpha and enhance risk-adjusted returns, harnessing timing, selection, customization, and scale.
The Bottom Line
The NewEdge SNAP and SNIP Structured Note SMAs boast advantages over today’s popular retail defined-outcome strategies. With expert portfolio managers navigating markets that are sometimes calm and complacent, but also occasionally volatile and unnerving, advisors and their clients have the potential to earn superior risk-adjusted returns. SNAP and SNIP can be valuable additions to a wealth manager’s toolkit.
Please see our Halo Disclosure Page for important disclosures
An investment in Structured Notes may not be suitable for all investors. These investments involve substantial risks. The appropriateness of a particular investment or strategy will depend on an investor’s individual circumstances and objectives.
Content and any tools discussed are provided for educational and informational purposes only. Halo Investing makes no investment recommendations and does not provide financial, tax, or legal advice. Any structured product or financial security discussed is for illustrative purposes only and is not intended to portray a recommendation to buy or sell a particular product or service.
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