Category Archives: How your broker gets paid

$4.95 trading commissions: a good deal?

March 9, 2017 By in How your broker gets paid, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

Yes, both for you and me and for Fidelity, which initiated the move down from $7.95.  Fidelity has quickly been followed by other discount brokers.

The reason for the reduction is the increasing popularity of ETFs with individuals who have been traditional buyers of no-load mutual funds–and who, because of this, aren’t used to paying commissions.  (Yes, the functional equivalent of trade commissions end up being deducted from mutual fund results through administrative expense charges, but people generally don’t notice this.)   Apparently, though, $4.95 is an acceptable number.

Fidelity, as a market maker in ETFs, will also earn a bid-asked spread on transactions.   In addition, the reports I’ve read suggest that the sponsor of an ETF can earn as much as 0.5% of assets annually through stock lending.  So forfeiting $3 on each trade won’t dent Fidelity’s bottom line, especially if this stimulates sales of in-house ETFs.

I think the main results of the move will be to lower our costs modestly and to hasten a bit the demise of traditional brokers.

 

 

 

 

 

candidate Trump vs. President Trump on banks

February 6, 2017 By in Getting financial advice, How your broker gets paid, Investment firms, Uncategorized Tags: Leave a comment

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly accused Hillary Clinton of being in the pocket of the big banks and brokerage houses.  He suggested that, unlike himself, she would act as president in the banks’ favor and against the interests of ordinary Americans.  That made her “Crooked Hillary.”

So it’s at least very surprising that in his first flurry of activity as President, Trump is advocating changes in government policy that are very favorable for big bank profits, while potentially harming customers and the financial system as a whole.

eliminating fiduciary responsibility

His first action has been to derail implementation of the mandate, recently instituted by President Obama, that financial advisers handling individuals’ retirement investments act as “fiduciaries.”  Put in the simplest terms, fiduciaries have a legal obligation to act in the client’s best interest rather than in their own.  This implies not recommending products that have a history of bad performance, but which pay high sales commissions to the salesman.  Apart from the Obama exception about pension assets, stockbrokers and insurance salesmen have no such requirement today.  (Congress has repeatedly refused to enact the necessary legislation.)

an example

Donsider three investment products:

–Product A is a Vanguard index fund.  It charges 0.08% of the assets per year as a management fee.

–Product B is an XYZ brand fund that is for all practical purposes the same as an index fund. Buyers pay a commission of 5% of the assets invested to acquire shares. The fund charges 1% of assets as a management and pays your broker 0.50% of your assets yearly as what amounts to a retention fee.

–Product C is just like Product B, except that its managers have underperformed the index by 2 percentage points for each of the past ten years.

Of these three, a fiduciary can legally only recommend A.  Because a broker or other financial adviser must only do things that are good for you, not what’s best for you, he can likely recommend both B and C if he believes you won’t lose money from them.  That’s even though C will likely perform 3.5 percentage points worse than A each year.

In a world where stocks gain an average of 8% a year, the holder of C makes 4.5%.   In nine years, the holder of A will have   doubled his money.  The holder of C will probably be up by 40%.

the Trump rationale

Trump administration official Gary Cohn, formerly a high executive at Goldman Sachs, explains that Mr. Trump believes the Obama rule is bad.  Why?  …because it may reduce consumer choice by potentially driving the purveyors of high-cost, poor performance products out of business.  That is, the Obama rule somehow “hurts” people by increasing the amount of money they’ll have at retirement.  This is sort of like saying we should eliminate car safety inspections because they prevent used car dealers from selling autos with no brakes–thereby limiting consumer choice.  Media reports say the analogy Cohn actually used is that the Obama rule is like having supermarkets that can only sell food that’s good for you.  Huh?

More tomorrow.

 

brokers, IRAs and the fiduciary standard

August 19, 2016 By in fiduciary standard, How your broker gets paid, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

a fiduciary

Being a fiduciary basically means putting your client’s financial interest ahead of your own.

A practical example:  

…given the choice between two products, one with a checkered performance record and high costs, but which makes payments (cash or trips or dinners…) to a financial adviser for selling the product, and a second with stellar performance and lower costs, and which makes no such payments, a fiduciary is required to recommend the second over the first.  At the very least, the fiduciary is required to disclose the facts of the situation, including the payoff from product #1, and allow the client to choose.

A brokerage firm registered representative, on the other hand, is not a fiduciary.  So he’s not required to alert the customer in advance if he’s recommending an inferior product, which is ok, but not great for the client and which–oh, by the way–pays him more.

For a long time consumer advocates have been trying to get Congress to change the laws so that brokers are redefined as fiduciaries.  Their push has intensified since the financial crisis.  But, although the change seems to me to be just common sense, and is in line with the standard of service customers already assume they are receiving, the financial industry lobby is still strong enough to have stymied these efforts.

retirement funds

The Labor Department, however, has recently used its administrative authority to issue guidelines for retirement investments which require advisers to act as fiduciaries, that is, to give investment advice that is in the client’s best interest.

Today, I heard the first reaction to these guidelines–other than general disapproval–from the brokerage industry.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the Edward Jones brokerage firm is withdrawing its mutual funds from retirement products affected by the Labor Department rules.  I looked on the Edward Jones website for clarification, but there’s no press release I can find.

To me, this means one of two things:

–EJ thinks its business practices run afoul of DOL guidelines and it is choosing to withdraw from this market rather than change them, and/or

–it thinks that 401k/IRA providers that sell Edward Jones products have potential compliance issues and prefers not to be involved.

Either way, this all seems to me evidence of how reliant the traditional brokerage profit model must be to offering investment “advice” that can’t pass the fiduciary test.

 

 

12b-1 fees: what they are

April 25, 2016 By in 12b-1 fees, Getting financial advice, How your broker gets paid, securities markets Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

fiduciary

The recent Labor Department determination that all financial advisors making recommendations for individuals’ retirement savings must act as fiduciaries is reviving interest in the topic of mutual fund/ETF fees and expenses.

Being a fiduciary means that the advisor has to place the client’s interest ahead of his own.  It isn’t permissible, for example, for a fiduciary to recommend an investment that is likely to return 5% per year, for selling which he gets a large commission, over a virtually identical one that will return 8%, but which pays a small commission.  For a non-fiduciary, which is what brokers/financial planners are when dealing with non-retirement assets, pushing the low return/high commission alternative is still ok legally.

Personally, I don’t like it that the fiduciary standard doesn’t apply to non-retirement investments.  I also don’t understand why individual investors don’t appear to be worked up about this.  I do understand why the big banks are opposed to fiduciariness, since applying the fiduciary standard to all advice to individuals strikes at the heart of the profits of the traditional “full service” brokerage industry.

12b-1 fees

The 12b-1 part refers to the section of the Investment Company Act of 1940 that governs how an open end mutual fund is allowed to pay for fund distribution and servicing.  It covers things like advertising, sending materials to prospective shareholders or having a call center to answer questions about the fund.

The general idea is that a fund benefits from retaining existing shareholders and adding new ones, so it’s a legitimate use of shareholder money to promote both objectives.

But the most common use of funds under the 12b-1 rule–and the least well understood, in my view–is periodic payments to financial advisors by a fund while clients continue to hold shares.   In the industry, these payments are called “trailing commissions,” or “trailers.”

The SEC doesn’t limit the amount of this fee, although FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the investment industry trade group) rules set an effective  cap of 1.0% of fund assets yearly.  My sense is that the most common fee percentage for an equity fund is 0.25% – 0.50%.  The best hard data I can find come from the ICI (Investment Company Institute, a mutual fund trade group), and are from 2003.  At that time, aggregate 12b-1 fees amounted to just under half the total administrative expenses, at 0.43% of assets annually.  The rest were old-fashioned (more clearly understood by customers) sales charges.

why is 12b-1 a current issue?

Historically, disclosure of these fees has been exactly crystal clear.  Try finding information about them on the ICI website, if you don’t believe me.  In fact, I can’t recall having met anyone not involved in selling mutual funds who was aware these fees exist.

So, does a broker/financial planner who advises a client on retirement investments in mutual funds have to make sure the customer understands that 12b-1 fees are being subtracted from NAV on a regular basis?  Once he gets that, does the customer put two and two together and realize he’s subject to these fees on non-retirement investments, too–and has been from day one?

How does he react?

The difficulty I’ve experienced in gathering factual data for this post tells me that fund companies think the reaction will be strongly negative.

 

investment advisers as fiduciaries: a new Labor Department proposal

April 6, 2016 By in Getting financial advice, How your broker gets paid, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

The Labor Department proposed new rules today that would require that brokers or financial planners or other professionals giving advice to individuals on their retirement savings act as fiduciaries.

what a fiduciary is

Being a fiduciary means being legally bound to give advice that’s best for the client, without regard for any benefits the adviser might get for recommending one investment over another.

Strangely, in my view, the fiduciary standard is not the rule advisers work under now.  Rather, advisers are only required to recommend products that are “suitable” for customers, meaning they fit the client’s goals, financial circumstances and risk tolerances.

The difference?

Another way of saying the same thing, the fiduciary is required to do what’s best for the client; under the old standard the adviser has simply got to avoid products that damage the customer.

For example:

A broker/planner has two general equity fund offerings:

–Fund A has a long history of strong investment management, consistently beating the S&P 500, and charges low fees

–Fund B has weak managers and an equally long record of sub-par investment performance, consistently losing to the S&P.  It also charges fees that are double the size of Fund A’s.  However, Fund B offers higher commissions to brokers who sell its product, plus trips to weekend informational seminars at resort locations to those who sell the most of it.

Under current rules, a broker/planner is permitted to recommend B over A, even though B is only better for the broker, and will presumably be considerably worse for the client.

costs are the smoking gun

Other than in hindsight, it may be hard to say whether manager X is better than manager Y.  And managers who consistently underperform are eventually culled, even in retail brokerage houses, where the emphasis is typically on strengthening the sales force, not the portfolio management team.

But I think it would be hard for a fiduciary to defend recommending one so-so product over another that costs half as much, and for selling which the fiduciary gets gifts, trips or a corner office and a secretary.

traditional brokers will be hurt the worst by these rules

That’s because they charge the most–partly to compensate highly-paid salesmen, partly to fund an expensive network of retail sales offices.

The traditional retail brokerage business has been dying a slow death since the advent of discount brokerage services in the 1970s.  Imposing a requirement that brokers do the best for their clients is another nail in the coffin.

for now, the rules only affect retirement savings accounts,

…not general savings/investments.  I presume this limitation is the result of fierce lobbying by financial advice providers opposed to the fiduciary standard.  But we may just be seeing the thin edge of the wedge.