Lake Avenue Financial, a Pasadena, Calif.-based registered investment advisory firm with $115 million in client assets, has hired Jess Bost, former vice president of strategic partnerships and client success at Alpha Architect, as lead financial planner.
Advisor Alex Chalekian founded Lake Avenue in 2014, and the firm now includes Rosa Chalekian, his wife, who serves as chief compliance officer.
Bost was laid off from Alpha Architect, the boutique asset management firm founded by Wes Gray. She said the firm was moving in a different direction with its marketing strategy, towards digital marketing, which was not her strong suit.
When she left, she decided not to stay on the investment side of the business.
“My heart has always been on the client-facing side, and really working deep in plans to help clients solve their own problems and move forward,” she said.
Bost’s hiring is also part of Lake Avenue’s move to focus on female clients.
“[Alex has] been experiencing a lot of that influx in his own clients, and has really enjoyed working with women,” Bost said. “So he wanted to move the direction of the firm toward being directly focused on serving the needs of women. That was one of the things we discussed is me heralding that new vision and that new direction.”
Bost and Chalekian both have a significant presence on social media and have been successful at using the channels to build their individual brands. They were notably active among the advisor-centric "FinTwit" user base on Twitter, before Elon Musk bought the company, changed the name to X and, some say, made the platform a less desirable space for self-promotion and "community building."
Using social media, Chalekian is the advisor known for calling out, in real time, what many deemed to be sexist comments made by Ken Fisher at a private, off-the-record conference in 2019. The ensuing negative publicity prompted some institutional investors to pull an estimated $3 billion from the firm, which managed $100 billion at the time.
The damage was short-lived. Fisher's AUM has since grown to $275 billion, and he recently sold a minority stake in the company to private equity firm Advent International and a unit of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. The deal valued Fisher Investments at $12.75 billion.