Category Archives: Investment firms

the revamped Google Finance

December 26, 2017 By in Analyzing performance, developing competence as an investor, Getting financial advice, Information for investors, investment advice, Investment firms, Uncategorized, Why measure performance? Tags: , , , 1 Comment

I hadn’t realized how dependent I’ve become over the past ten years on the Google Finance page.  Google Finance’s debut coincided closely with my retirement from my job as a global equity portfolio manager.  I found that GF met enough of my personal money management needs that I didn’t miss my $26,000/year Bloomberg terminal much at all.  (The ability to see a company income statement dissected in a way that revealed major customers and suppliers–and their relative importance–came to
Bloomberg later.  Assuming it’s still there, that’s a really useful feature for a securities analyst.)

 

What I liked about the old GF:

–everything was on one page, so I could take in a lot of information at a single glance

–it contained information about stocks, bonds and currencies, so I could see the main variables affecting my investment performance grouped together

–there was a sector breakout of that day’s equity performance on Wall Street

–I could add new stocks to a portfolio list easily, and thereby be able to see what was going up/down for a large group of stocks I was interested in

–I could compare several stocks/indices on a single chart, and vary the contents of that chart–and its timeframe–easily.

 

The charts themselves were not so hot.  But I could either live with that or use Yahoo Finance.  (I have a love/hate relationship with charts, in any event.  My issue is that stretching the price and/or time axes can change a bump in the road into a crisis and vice versa.)

 

The new Google Finance?

well…

–All of the stuff on my “likes” list has disappeared.

–The Dow Jones Industrials–a wacky, irrelevant index whose main positive point is that it’s easy to calculate–features prominently in coverage of the US.

–The Sensex has been consistently listed as a top-five world index, even though India is an insiders market that’s extremely difficult for foreigners to access.  Same for Germany, where there’s no equity culture and little of the economy is publicly listed.  No mention of Hong Kong or Shanghai or Japan or (most days) the UK.  Yes, the UK economy is smaller than Germany’s.  But London’s significance comes from its being the listing hub for many European-based multinationals.

 

My conclusion:  the new page has been put together by people who, whatever their tech smarts, have no clue at all about what an investor needs/wants.  Its overall tone seems to be to provide information that an investor will like to hear, based on browsing history.  Put a different way, the new page strives to turn users into the prototypical “dumb money.”  Actually, now that I’ve come to this realization, maybe the new page isn’t so counterproductive after all.  Just don’t use it.

 

 

the stock market crash of 1987

October 9, 2017 By in correction vs. bear market, investment advice, Investment firms, Portfolio management, Strategy, Uncategorized, Wall Street Journal Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today on the birth of the ETF–and the index fund, for that matter.

Two factors stand out to me as being missing from the account, however:

–when the S&P 500 peaked in August 1987, it was trading at 20x earnings.  This compared very unfavorably with the then 10% yield on the long Treasury bond.  A 10% Treasury yield would imply a PE multiple on the S&P of 10x–meaning either that bonds were dirt cheap or that the stock market was wildly overvalued vs. the bond market.

–a new product, called at the time portfolio insurance, a form of dynamic hedging, had very recently been created and sold to institutional investors by entrepreneurs steeped in academic efficient markets theory.  Roughly speaking, the “insurance” consisted in the intention to stabilize equity portfolio values by overlaying a program of buying and selling futures against the physical stock.  Buy futures as/if the market rises; sell futures as/if the market falls.

One of the key assumptions of the insurers was that willing/eager counterparties for their futures transactions could be found at all times and at theoretically predictable prices.  On the Friday before Black Monday–itself a down day–the insurers’ model required them to sell a large number of futures contracts.  Few buyers were available, though.  Those who were willing to transact were bidding far below the theoretical contract value.  Whoops.

On Monday morning, the insurers, who appear to have had negligible actual market experience, capitulated and began selling futures contracts at whatever price they could get.  This put downward pressure both on futures and on the physical market.  At the same time, pension funds, noting the large gap between the price of futures and the (much higher) price of the underlying stocks, began to buy futures.  But to counterbalance the added risk to their portfolios, they sold correspondingly large amounts of stocks.  A mess.

Arguably, we would shrug off at least part of this today as just being crazy hedge funds or algorithmic traders.  Back in 1987, however, equity portfolio managers had never before seen derivatives exerting such a powerful influence on the physical market.  It was VERY scary.

conclusions for today

Stocks and bonds are nowhere near as out of whack with one another as they were back in 1987.  The nearest we have today to a comparable issue is what happens as worldwide excess liquidity is drained by central banks from money markets.

The trigger for the Black Monday collapse came from an area that was little understood, even by those involved in it–activity that had severe negative unexpected consequences.  The investors who did the best after the crash, I think, were those who understood the most quickly what had happened.

Collateral damage:  one of the most important results of Black Monday, I think, was the loss of confidence in traditional investment advisers working for the big brokerage houses that it created.  This was, I think, partly because of individuals’ market losses, but partly, too, to the generally horrible executions received when they sold stocks in the aftermath.  This was the start of a significant acceleration of the shift to discount brokers and to mutual fund products.

paying for brokerage research

August 14, 2017 By in investment advice, Investment firms, paying for investment advice, soft dollars, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

As part of an EU overhaul of the financial industry, the UK has recently concluded an inquiry into pricing practices for mutual fund and other products offered to individual investors.  Press commentary is that the good luck for an industry with a bewildering array of prices (much higher than in the US) and little link between cost and value is not having been referred to the law enforcement authorities for criminal prosecution.

One big issue has been “soft dollars,” that is, paying brokers higher than usual commissions in return for their research, or for trading machines, or even newspapers–items that customers generally believe (and rightly suppose, in my view) they are paying for through management fees.   …but no!

Asset managers have been proclaiming that this is a weighty and complex issue, that the don’t know how to proceed.  They’ve generally been gnashing their teeth.

To me, this is all somewhat comical.  For decades, firms that do business in the US have been following an SEC mandate to keep meticulous records of the amount of their soft dollar expenses and what is being paid for.   The general rule was that if you stayed in line with industry practice, meaning doing whatever Fidelity did, you’d be ok legally.  They know exactly what they’ve been doing.  Also, the EU inquiry (see the link above) has been going on for three years.

There are two real issues:

–there’s a lot of money at stake, and

–handling the potential outcry from customers when they realize they’ve been paying twice (management fee + soft dollars) for research expenses.

An example:

A mutual fund has $50 billion in assets.  It turns those assets over at the industry average of 50% per year.  That means $50 billion in buys and $50 billion in sells.

Let’s say: the average stock trades for $40; the soft-dollar markup is $.02 per share; and the markup is taken on 20% of all shares traded (maybe slightly high, but the math is easier).

So, the fund “service” includes giving up $10 million a year of customer money on brokerage commissions in order to get the management company free goods and services.  That’s even though they’re collecting something like $250 million in management fees from the same customers.

disclosure vs. restructuring

Internally, I think disclosure is the lesser of the two issues.  The more difficult one is that industry revenues are stagnant or falling and by far the largest expense of any investment manager is salaries.  So, whose pocket does the lost soft dollar revenue come out of?

Vanguard, this decade’s Fidelity

Just prior to the 2007 financial crisis, Fidelity decided to turn up the competitive heat on fund management rivals by declaring it was unilaterally going to stop using soft dollars.  This time around, it’s silent so far.

Last week, Vanguard made a similar announcement.

 

UK investigation of the investment management industry

July 5, 2017 By in investment advice, Investment firms, paying for investment advice, Uncategorized Tags: , , Leave a comment

The UK Financial Conduct Authority is wrapping up a two year investigation of the money management industry in this important global financial center.

Despite heavy industry lobbying which has squelched similar inquiries in the US, the FCA’s just-released preliminary report is an indictment of many traditional industry practices.  Excessive fees, lack of disclosure and conflicts of interest among asset managers and pension consultants are recurring themes.  The Financial Times, which seems to me to be in the best position to know, thinks that the “good” news for the industry is that the FCA has not recommended a government investigation of its practices for potential breach of UK law.

Although the investigation began before Brexit became a reality, it occurs to me that the FCA’s conclusions are being shaped by the idea that UK investment services no longer need simply meet the (very) low bar of being better than what’s available in the rest of the EU.  Without a built-in clientele, services must also be good in an absolute sense.  A regulatory regime that gives investors a fair shake is a sine qua non–as well as miles better than what is generally the case elsewhere, including in the US, the current market leader.

The FCA investigation has two implications I can see for US-based money management:

–increased disclosure of fees/performance in the UK will increase pressure for similar disclosure in the US.  One particular bone of contention is the use of “soft dollars” or “research commissions,” meaning a management company pays a broker, say, 2x the going rate for a portion of its trading.   In return it receives goods/services that the manager would otherwise have to pay for from management fees.  The kinds of stuff a manager can receive is already regulated in the US, but disclosure of the amount of money in extra commissions ultimately being paid by clients is not.  The FCA will require such disclosure in the UK.  My sense is that the amounts will be surprisingly large.

–during the years prior to the financial meltdown, US banks opened London branches to process transactions–often involving US buyers and US sellers of US products–that were allowed in the UK but illegal domestically (think:  sub-prime mortgage derivatives).  This was a result of the UK’s decision to build up its financial services industry using a “regulation lite” approach to governance.

In the absence of any changes to US laws, why wouldn’t large US institutional investors demand that their investment managers similarly conduct business out of London.  In this case, however, it would be to obtain lower fees, greater transparency and better legal recourse in the case of disputes.

Yes, this sounds a little crazy, but the legacy investment management industry–both managers and consultants–are so powerful that I think favorable change for investors is unlikely to happen otherwise.

 

 

professional investment advice (ii)

May 10, 2017 By in investment advice, Investment firms, paying for investment advice, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 3 Comments

Yesterday, I wrote about the problems a Wall Street Journal reporter had in discovering how much she paid in fees to the professionals she hired to invest her money.  The task, which we’d think should be a piece of cake, turned out to be very difficult.  Although the reporter didn’t identify the firm in question, the corporate philosophy seems to be the usual one for active managers of emphasizing service rather than fees.  This decision, which is hard to fault in itself, has been transmuted into two courses of action–bury fee information as deeply as possible, and keep the fees (1.4% of assets per year, in this case) very high, in the hope no one notices.

Oddly enough, this strategy has been relatively effective for decades.

It seems to me, though, that being aware of what one is paying for professional investment advice is only part of the assessment process.  A second important criterion is what the gains in investment performance are that come from having an investment adviser.  The relevant metric is how effective the adviser’s asset allocation and portfolio management efforts are in keeping the client at least even with the appropriate benchmark after subtracting fees.  

Andrea Fuller’s case would work out like this:

Let’s say her “moderate” asset allocation ends up being 60% stocks, 40% bonds.  If we take the returns of the S&P 500 and of some broad bond index as proxies, a rough benchmark return for her over a given period is easy to calculate.

In my view, a reasonable expectation would be that one’s portfolio should (at least) keep pace with the index after fees.  I say “reasonable” although knowing less than a quarter of active managers are able to consistently exceed my standard and over half consistently fall short.

In an ideal world, an active manager who is consistently unable to perform in line with the appropriate benchmark after fees has an easy fix–at least a partial one.  Lower fees to the point where the portfolio is at least close to the index.  Her firm’s high fee level and the teeth pulling needed to figure out what they are suggest this is the last thing on its mind.

Given that this is the case, the operative question for Andrea, and for anyone else, is how much the service the firm may be providing–like determining asset allocation or the availability of a knowledgeable account executive to answer questions or handholding during crises–is worth in terms of losses to an index fund strategy that one could easily implement on one’s own.

It also seems to me that if annual returns consistently fall more than 1% below a benchmark after fees it’s worth the time to shop around for a different investment management firm.