Session 1: Your Money: ReimaginingWealth Through Simple Sketches - Advisor Edition: In thisengaging and thought-provoking session, financial professionals will explore the critical tensions that shape advisor-client relationships and influence financial decision-making. Carl Richards, renowned for his New York Times sketches and behavioral insights, will guide advisors through aninteractive discussion, helping them move beyond rigid planning to a more adaptable, client-centered approach. Usinga selection of 7 to 12 curated sketches, this session will examine key challenges, such as:
● Purpose vs. Goals – How to alignfinancial plans with a client’s deeper values, ensuring long-termengagement.
● Precision vs. Adaptability – Why financial planning should beseen as an ongoing process, not a static document, and how to navigate uncertainty with confidence.
● Facts vs. Emotions – The role of behavioral biases in financialdecision-making and how to use empathy to strengthen trust and communication.
SESSION 2: Be the Best Advisor in Your Client's Toughest Times: When clients cope with death, divorce, retirement,empty nest, or other life transitions, what you say and do in theoffice has more influence on your client relationship than yourfinancial savvy ever did. Learn essential skills forunderstanding and addressing your client’s experience whenthey encounter difficult or emotional life events. Set yourselfapart from all the other advisors who have never been taught, and build long-term loyalty in the process.
SESSION 3: Implementing Alternatives: Following 2008's Financial Crisis it became clear that a liquidity crunch in both stocks and bonds when indiscriminate selling occurred and correlations went to 1, that asset classes, strategies, and sectors of the market that could effectively diversify during periods of turmoil and the unique Monetary Policy that followed for 13+ years could benefit an Asset Allocation. Post-2008, as Wall Street innovates to 'solve a problem for a profit' Fund Families across the industry unveiled their version of Alternatives. In the institutional space, where Pensions and Insurance companies invest to match liabilities to obligations,they found themselves following QE1-3 & Operation Twist in an ultra-low rate environment where bonds with low yields could hardly deliver like they used to. This pushed Institutions to substitute private markets in a big way to a position public market stocks and bonds had previously inhabited. When 2020 and the pandemic unexpectedly struck, institutional investors who had gone to private equity and private credit for returns and yield premium, also realized the benefit of low-volatility on instruments that are not appraised on the same time frame as public market securities and genuinely delivered low correlation to public markets due to the longer term mentality of the investor base. Since this realization and many regulatory changes, the private markets category has mushroomed. The traditional players with household names have offered a more democratized structure of privates for many years, but there's been proliferation new entrants in the form of GPs, structures,and asset classes since 2020, when the space was truly tested in the pandemic and delivered as promised. It sometimes feels like the Wild West when it comes to evaluating Alternatives, so we want to arm you with some rules and laws to abide by as you navigate. As a retail investor many Advisors have mixed experiences with Alternatives because of the depth and breadth of these markets. Calamos' history in risk management andoptions enables us to help Investors make sense of alternatives and implement them with greater understanding to meet their true objectives. This Course will help you expand your definition, define your objectives, and ask the right questions toget the outcomes you and your clients' are seeking across a variety of market climates.