A weekly update on issues important to the Investment Management industry
Last week we were surprised by a rare sighting, an S-1 filed by a prominent player in the RIA community. Dynasty Financial Partners seeks to raise $100 million in a public offering. The mercifully terse prospectus is less than 250 pages, and is recommended reading for anyone who swims (or fishes) in this pond.
Publicly traded hedge fund managers and PE firms nearly doubled in value during 2021. In this week’s post, we review the investment manager performance in 2021 by sector and AUM size and provide implications for your RIA in 2022 based on the results.
The asset management industry fared well in 2021 against a backdrop of rising markets and improved net inflows. Strong performance in equity markets was a major contributor to this performance. In addition, 2021 saw modest organic growth, although there were significant variances by asset class. In this week’s post, we discuss these issues and present our outlook for the industry.
As year-end approaches, we hope to spread some cheer with our annual RIA Holiday Quiz. There is a chance to win a prize with a perfect score! Don’t forget to supply your contact information so we know who to send the prize to. Merry Christmas!
We’re often asked by clients what the range of multiples for RIAs is in the current market. At any given time, the range can be quite wide between the least attractive firms and the most attractive firms. The factors that affect where a firm falls within that range include the firm’s margin, scale, growth rate of new client assets, effective realized fees, personnel, geographic market, firm culture, and client demographics (among others). In this post, we focus on the client demographics factor, explain how buyers view client demographics, and explore steps some firms are taking to reach a broader client base.
A couple of times a week, we get calls from someone we’ve never met saying they’d like to talk with us about their RIA acquisition strategy. About half are RIAs or trustcos looking for expansion, and the other half are private equity or family offices. Very few are calling because they have a particular target in mind, fewer still have begun the process of negotiating with a potentially interested seller.
If your acquisition strategy these days is starting from scratch, you’re in a tough spot. There’s nothing on the lot, and what is available looks expensive. That doesn’t mean you should give up, though. In this post we offer some practical tips to pursue an acquisition strategy in this market environment, as well as the markets to follow.
RIA stocks saw mixed performance during the third quarter amidst volatile performance in the broader market. In September, the S&P 500 had its worst month since March 2020, and many publicly traded asset and wealth management stocks followed suit.
In this week’s post, we illustrate what this means for your RIA and give a prediction on the outlook of the RIA industry.
The rise of “permanent capital” providers is both in response to and appropriate for the current environment of premium entrance multiples in the RIA space. While making a permanent capital investment doesn’t eliminate the depressive effects of current valuations on returns, it does help to mitigate them.
Absent self-imposed pressure to generate an exit within the foreseeable future, RIA investors can focus on opportunities for sustainable and growing distributions – the real value of investing in investment management.
The pricing of minority transactions in the RIA space leaves some people scratching their head. Traditional valuation theory holds that investors pay less for minority interests than controlling interests. Reality suggests otherwise.
Consolidation is a theme that has a lot of traction in the RIA industry: that a growing multitude of buyers are scrambling to outbid each other for a limited and shrinking number of firms. With the rapid pace of deal activity in the RIA industry, you might expect to see the number of firms decline, as that is typically the norm for consolidating industries. But that’s not been the case in the RIA industry, at least yet. Despite consolidation pressures and record levels of acquisition activity, the reality is that the number of RIAs continues to increase, with formations outpacing consolidation.
Another way to track consolidation is to look at how assets under management are distributed across firms of different sizes, rather than at the number of firms. The industry hasn’t seen significant consolidation by this metric either. So what does all this mean for the industry? This post tackles that question.
The second quarter was especially kind to the alt manager sector, which benefited from favorable market conditions and growing interest from institutional investors. These trends initially took root last Fall before gaining considerable momentum in the second quarter.
A few weeks ago we blogged about how RIA stock prices have increased over 70% on average over the last year. This rapid ascent begs the question if valuations have gotten too rich with the market run-up during this time. In this post, we answer this question.
Dynasty’s move from New York to Florida and UBS’s relocation to Tennessee got plenty of attention. Post-pandemic, we’re starting to hear of smaller RIAs contemplating similar moves. There’s plenty of opportunity, because most investment management firms still call high-cost, high-tax states home.
Over the last year, many publicly traded investment managers have seen their stock prices increase by 70% or more. This increase is not surprising, given the broader market recovery and rising fee base of most firms. With AUM for many firms at or near all time highs, trailing twelve month multiples have expanded significantly, reflecting the market’s expectation for higher profitability in the future. For more insight into what’s driving the increase in stock prices, we’ve decomposed the increase to show the relative impact of the various factors driving returns between March 31, 2020 and March 31, 2021.
This week we discuss why RIA management teams need to look a step or two beneath the surface to understand why their firm is growing.
On balance, 2021 should prove to be another challenging but favorable year for wealth management firms that focus on their clients’ needs and take advantage of rising demand for financial planning services. Industry headwinds remain, but we’re confident that the industry will prosper, diversify, and expand.
Is human input in investment management a feature, or a bug? Our experience has been that human input finds unique solutions, secures and strengthens relationships, and ultimately provides clients with the best outcomes. Algorithms can be great tools, so long as their user has great skills.
Growth-style investments have outpaced their value counterparts by a considerable margin since the Financial Crisis of 2008 and 2009. Propelled by an 11-year bull market from 2009 to 2020 and additional lift to tech stocks in a work-from-home environment, growth investing dominated value-oriented equities until just a few months ago. Now, the long-running trendline appears to be rolling over.
As a financial analyst, a CFA charter holder, and a generally reasonable person, I know that Zillow isn’t accurate; but as a homeowner, I can’t help myself. When I am walking around my neighborhood, I always have the Zillow App open, and am speculating about how the “Z-estimate” for my house compares to my neighbors’. And, of course, my house always is better. Why? Because I own it. It’s called the endowment effect. I (as a homeowner) am emotionally biased to believe that something (my house) is valued higher than the market would ascribe, simply because I already own it.
And you, the owner of an RIA, may believe your firm is valued higher than the market value too, and old rules of thumb and recent industry headlines amplify the problem.
Long before Reddit investors discovered that you could Occupy Wall Street more effectively with out of the money call options than you can with tents, Porsche briefly turned itself into a hedge fund and used a similar tactic to try to take over Volkswagen. The story sheds some light on how market pricing does, and does not, reveal the value of a business. Benchmarking the value of an RIA off the behavior of a few aggressive consolidators has similar limitations.
Share prices for publicly traded investment managers have trended upward with the market since March’s collapse. Aggregators fared particularly well over the last nine months on low borrowing costs and steady gains on their RIA acquisitions. Traditional asset and wealth managers have also performed well over this time on rising AUM balances with favorable market conditions. Against this backdrop, we discuss recent market performance, implications for your RIA, and a potentially improving outlook.
Early in the COVID pandemic, PFI Advisors published an article outlining how RIAs could perform an “Operational Diagnostic” to improve their profitability. Matt Sonnen wrote, “For now, advisors are focusing on exactly what they should be doing – guiding their clients through this turmoil and keeping them calm and focused on their long-term financial goals. When the time is right, however, I’ll forward this article to our clients so they can begin the work of focusing on the bottom line…”
Nine months later, most RIAs and their clients have recovered from the market volatility and ended up having a very good year, at least on paper. Now’s the time for RIA principals to consider how they can advance their firms to be ready to meet the next challenge with greater ease.
We’re featuring Matt Sonnen’s wisdom on operational best practices and business strategy in our upcoming conference, RIA Practice Management Insights, on March 3 and 4.
As year-end approaches, we hope to spread some cheer with our RIA holiday quiz. Merry Christmas!
Share prices for publicly traded asset and wealth managers have trended upward during the second and third quarters after collapsing in mid-March with the broader market. Alt asset managers have fared well over the last year as volatility and depressed asset prices have created an opportunity to deploy dry power and raise new funds in certain asset classes. Traditional asset and wealth managers have generally moved in line with the broader equity market, while leveraged RIA aggregators have seen more volatility, both up and down, as the market bottomed in March before trending upward.
