CONTRIBUTORS
The Canvas Team
Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it.”
When we launched Canvas in 2019, direct indexing was a sleepy corner of the market and custom indexing didn’t exist. Today, these twin categories have great velocity.
Custom indexing builds upon the fundamentals of Direct Indexing to deliver tax managed, deeply personalized portfolios to a wide range of investors at low cost. Through our Canvas platform, advisors can seamlessly create portfolios that reflect their clients’ needs, values, and goals.
More than 5 years and $18+ billion into our Custom Indexing journey, our expectations for Canvas have steadily grown. Not only have our partners embraced the levers we designed to personalize their clients’ portfolios, but they’ve been instrumental in helping us develop new features to drive a unified and operationally efficient, automated portfolio management platform. Much of Canvas’s current codebase is the result of this partnership. Collaborating with advisors, we’ve seen the benefits of truly personal, and highly scalable, customization, and we believe it is the future of investing.
How are advisors using Canvas?
Given the degree of customization available on Canvas, one of the most common questions we get from prospective investors is “how are people actually using it?”
At a high level, Canvas helps advisors to manage their clients' core equity allocation while benefiting from potential tax savings and customizing their portfolios to match their preferences. The average account blends multiple strategies falling into different objective buckets to achieve desired investment exposures. Though the average Canvas account has a 60% weight to passive equites, advisors using Canvas can easily add fundamental and factor-based equity strategies to client accounts as well as fixed income. Recently, we’ve added options overlays to the platform, long-short capabilities, and other levers to truly personalize accounts which are starting to gain traction.

Analysis by O’Shaughnessy Asset Management (OSAM). For illustrative purposes only. Data as of 12/31/2025.
While the chart and supporting data will evolve in the months and years ahead, what won’t change is how advisors and their clients use the platform in unique ways to address their needs and position themselves for long-term financial security.
That’s what we pride ourselves on—not simply the breadth of features and levers available, but the breadth of problems those tools empower advisors to solve for their clients.
WHAT ARE THE RISKS?
All investments involve risk, including the loss of principal.
CANVAS® is an interactive web-based investment tool developed by O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, L.L.C. (“OSAM”) that permits an investment professional to select a desired investment strategy for the professional’s client.
O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, LLC is a Franklin Templeton affiliated company.
WF: 9438115
