Alan Brochstein, CFA has been contributing articles to Seeking Alpha since 2007. He has worked on the sell-side and the buy-side in fixed-income and on the buy-side in equities. Alan got his start as a financial professional in the securities industry in 1986 after earning a B.A. in Economics and in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences from Northwestern University. He was managing investments in institutional environments until he founded AB Analytical Services in 2007 to provide independent consulting to registered investment advisors. He also prepared management reviews for Management CV, a firm focused on evaluating the skill and quality of management teams at publicly-traded companies.Alan was one of the first investment professionals to focus exclusively on the cannabis industry when he started to doing so in 2014. In 2013, he launched 420 Investor, a subscription service focused on cannabis stocks that he ran on the Seeking Alpha platform until May 20026, and he was also the managing partner of New Cannabis Ventures, a leading provider of relevant financial information in the cannabis industry since 2015. Alan has been a big fan of ETFs for decades, liking both how they enable individual investors to manage diversified investment portfolios at a reasonable cost and investment managers to help their clients have passively managed portfolios among their holdings. He has been writing about ETFs extensively at Seeking Alpha since 2025, aiming to help readers better understand the ETF universe, which has gotten quite large Alan is trying to help investors understand what they own or what they could own and to also help them become aware of the risks of their ETFs relative to other ETFs.He maintains a 85 ETF Focus List (all passive) that is broad, including both very large and popular ETFs as well as many that are not as widely followed but that stand out in his view. He has also created a model portfolio as of year-end 2025.
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