Spotlight: Ancorato and Its Actively Managed Structured Note SMAs
The Idaho firm turned a process built for its own advisory clients into six risk-tiered structured note strategies sold to other advisors.
September 2, 2026
Ancorato is a third-party money manager that builds separately managed accounts entirely out of structured notes and distributes them to financial advisors rather than to investors directly. The firm launched its first strategy in 2019 and operates from Meridian, Idaho. The registered entity behind it is Legacy Investment Solutions, LLC, doing business as Ancorato, an affiliated RIA of Legacy Wealth Management, LLC. Pete Covino III and Andy Rad are founders and managing partners, and Pisoot Senethavilay is president.
According to the firm, the process it now sells started as its own. Ancorato’s principals worked as wealth advisors first, and the investment philosophy behind the strategies was formulated for their own clients: households whose retirement income depended on the results, rather than institutional accounts.
Six strategies across income and growth
The lineup runs two objectives at three risk levels each. On the income side, Fixed-Income Structured Notes (FISN) sits at the conservative end, Balanced Income (BISN) carries a moderately conservative profile the firm describes as targeting mid- to high-single-digit returns, and High-Income (HISN) is built for investors accepting more risk for yield. On the growth side are Anchored Growth (AGSN), Balanced Growth (BGSN), which Ancorato describes as targeting high-single to low-double-digit annualized returns, and Opportunistic Growth (OGSN). The underliers shift as the tiers climb, from broad indices and sector ETFs at the conservative end to individual stocks in OGSN.
How the SMA is built
Each account holds 20 to 40 notes spread across issuing banks. The firm pools investor capital to bring minimums down, ladders maturity dates, and applies allocation caps per issuer and size limits per trade, with breach thresholds set from backtesting. Diligence before a note enters a portfolio includes backtesting, breach history analysis and issuer-level filtering, per the firm.
Call management is what the structure is organized around. A note that gets called early ends the income it was bought to produce and leaves the proceeds to redeploy in a different market. Ancorato manages the portfolios weekly and rebalances as notes are called or mature.
StrategyLink, the firm’s advisor platform, connects to the advisor’s existing firm and custodian instead of requiring a separate SMA account, and consolidates note positions into sleeves for reporting. Ancorato lists Schwab, Fidelity, and RBC among supported custodians, and advisors can also reach the strategies through the SMArtX and GeoWealth TAMP platforms.
The firm has published a white paper arguing for deploying into notes across a staggered six-to-nine-month window rather than all at once, on the reasoning that it spreads pricing across market conditions and reduces timing risk.
Scale and recent developments
Ancorato reported passing $250 million in assets under management as of June 30, 2025, and said it had acquired more than 370 notes since 2019 across six strategies, with close to 51% having gone full cycle as of that date. Reported net annualized returns since inception, as of the same date: FISN 10.66% from 2019, HISN 16.81% from 2021, AGSN 2.40% from 2019, and OGSN 36.81% from 2020. FISN also reported an average net coupon of 11.49% in the second quarter of 2025.
In December 2025 the firm placed four strategies on Nitrogen, the risk-alignment platform formerly called Riskalyze, with FISN carrying a Riskalyze Score of 34 and a GPA of 4.1 on the October 2025 dataset. Ancorato expanded distribution over the same year, adding Patrick LeBlanc and Andrew Burghardt as vice presidents of capital markets for the eastern and western regions and bringing in Joanna Venetch, ADISA‘s president-elect, to lead national accounts.
