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RIA Valuation Insights

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April 18, 2017 Asset Management

Active Management Down But Not Out

Fresh off a 111-82 KO from the San Antonio Spurs on Saturday, our hometown Memphis Grizzlies are certainly battered but not totally eliminated from this year’s NBA title race. As this post goes to press, we still don’t know the outcome of Game 2, but it will undoubtedly be an uphill climb for the Grizz as it usually is against their divisional foes in Central Texas. Still, the Spurs/Grizz rivalry over the last ten years has not been nearly as one-sided as the battle for fund flows between active and passive investors in the ETF era.

April 10, 2017 Current Events

Will the Fiduciary Rule Ever Become Law?

RIA Central Investment Forum Follow-up

Last week, Matt Crow and I presented at RIA Institute’s 3rd Annual RIA Central Investment Forum, and this question was asked to the crowd of 70+ industry participants in attendance. Only about half the audience raised a hand. This comes after another delay last week, further extending the rule, now set to go into effect June 9th. Even most of those at the conference who thought it would eventually become law thought this deadline was too ambitious. So why the delay?

April 3, 2017 Industry Trends

Excuse Me, Flo?

Inflows and Outflows Drive Disparity in Performance between Different Classes of Asset Managers

Immediately before ordering the Soup Du Jour and duping Sea Bass into picking up his lunch tab, Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd Christmas, rudely accosts his waitress at the Truk-Stop Diner with this inexplicable reference to the early 1980s sitcom starring Polly Holliday as Florence Jean “Flo” Castleberry. Decades after the movie’s release in 1994, the market seems to be postulating the same question in pricing RIAs.

March 27, 2017 Practice Management

RIA Performance Metrics: Keep an Eye on Your Dashboard

A persistent truth about investment management is that no analyst ever saw a piece of information he or she didn’t want. Professional investors are, by their very nature, research hounds – digging deep into a prospective investment’s operating model, financials, competitive landscape, management biographies, and whatever else might be relevant to try to evaluate the relative merit of buying into one idea instead of another. This same diligence doesn’t always extend to practice management, though, and we are not infrequently surprised at how little attention management teams at RIAs devote to studying their own companies.

March 20, 2017 Transactions

Lean on Me

Active Managers Combine to Stem the Tide of Fleeting Assets

Albeit unlikely that Bill Withers was alluding to the plight of active management in his 1972 hit solo, it does appear to be an apt descriptor for recent dealmaking in the RIA sector. Standard Life’s $4.7 billion purchase of Aberdeen Asset Management earlier this month follows shareholder pressure to right the ship after years of significant underperformance from both firms. The market seems less convinced.

March 13, 2017 Practice Management

An All-Terrain Clause for your RIA’s Buy-Sell Agreement

Clients writing new buy-sell agreements or re-writing existing ones frequently ask us how often they should have their RIA valued. Like most things in life, it depends. We usually recommend having a firm valued annually, and most of our clients usually do just that. “Usually,” though, is subject to many specific considerations.

March 6, 2017 Current Events

Looking through the Buffett Brouhaha

The Oracle Still Believes in Human Innovation

Since I gave up politics for Lent this year, I’ve had more time to keep up with the deeper recesses of the financial press, which led me to Warren Buffett’s annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett’s prose is a literary genre unto itself; a remarkably plain-spoken approach to making even the most complex and dull aspects of investment management simple and entertaining. If all “management letters” were penned as well, shareholders might actually read them. Perhaps that’s why they aren’t.

February 27, 2017 Current Events

Q4 Call Reports

As we do every quarter, we take a look at some of the earnings commentary of pacemakers in asset management to gain further insight into the challenges and opportunities developing in the industry.

February 20, 2017 Industry Trends

Investment Manager Pricing Takes the Scenic Route

Smaller public RIAs started and ended 2016 as a pack, but for about eight months performance was anything but similar. In what I can best describe as a wild ride to a close finish, at one point in July of 2016 Cohen & Steers (CNS) was up nearly 40% while Virtus Investment Partners (VRTS) was down over 30%. Seventy point divergences don’t happen very often, especially considering that, by Christmas of last year, the same spread narrowed to less than eight points.

February 14, 2017 Practice Management

RIA Matchmaking

Hardly a week goes by that we don’t get asked what we think are optimal qualities of an RIA merger partner. Answering that always feels a little like giving dating advice: different partners suit different partners. No one disputes that the industry is ripe for consolidation, but there’s no easy way to “swipe-right” on a target company’s ADV, and it’s pretty unlikely that sec.gov is going to have its own version of Tinder anytime soon. Nevertheless, in honor of today’s holiday, here are a few thoughts on what to think about when considering a merger partner.

February 6, 2017 Asset Management

Valuing RIAs

In essence, RIAs may be both highly profitable and prospectively ephemeral. Balancing the particular risks and opportunities of a given investment management firm is fundamental to developing a valuation. If you haven’t already, read our whitepaper covering this balancing act in this week’s post.

January 30, 2017 Asset Management Current Events Margins and Compensation

ESG Investing Comes of Age Despite (or Maybe Because of) Trump

Investment strategies that screen for environmental, social, and governance criteria (ESG) is a still developing product niche that has, until recently, been more about talk than action. The pitch is that investing in businesses that demonstrate broad-based corporate responsibility provides a pathway to management teams who think long term, mitigate risk, and lead their industries. The beauty of an investment product like ESG is client stickiness.

January 24, 2017 Industry Trends Transactions

RIA Deal-Making Was Flat Last Year but Poised to Surge in 2017

Despite a rocky year for asset manager valuations, sector M&A was still strong. Total transactions were down about 10% from 2015 while aggregate deal value increased close to 20%. Several themes from the prior year also persisted as wealth management acquisitions remained robust and banks continued to play a pivotal role on both the buy-side and the sell-side.

January 16, 2017 Asset Management Industry Trends

Asset Manager Valuations Mixed at the Start of 2017

A quick glance at year-end pricing of publicly traded asset managers reveals a continued skid in cap factors for mutual fund providers offset by some multiple expansion for traditional and alternative asset managers.

January 11, 2017 Trust Companies

Trust Banks Thrive in 2016 on Steepening Yield Curve

All three publicly traded trust banks (BNY Mellon, State Street, and Northern Trust) outperformed the market in 2016, continuing their upward trajectory over the last few years but still lagging the broader indices since the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Placing this recent comeback in its historical context reveals the headwinds these businesses have been facing in a low interest rate environment that has significantly compressed their money market fees and yields on fixed income investments.

January 3, 2017 Industry Trends

RIA Valuation Insights: Best of 2016

Happy New Year 2017! Here are this past year’s 5 most popular posts from the RIA Valuation Insights Blog.

December 27, 2016 Alternative Asset Managers

Portfolio Valuation and Regulatory Scrutiny

Over the past decade, we have been retained by several investment funds to assist them in responding to formal and informal SEC investigations regarding fair value measurement of portfolio investments. Reflecting back on those engagements yields a couple observations and reminders for funds and fund managers as they go through the quarterly valuation process.

December 19, 2016 Industry Trends

The Rise of Robo-Advisors

Part 2

As the second part to last week’s blogpost, the following section from Jay Wilson’s forthcoming book on FinTech describes ways to think about the valuation of robo-advisors, including some real world examples of technology based investment management platforms that transacted.

December 12, 2016 Industry Trends

The Rise of Robo-Advisors

Part 1

Despite the potential for FinTech innovation within wealth management, significant uncertainty still exists regarding whether these innovations will displace traditional wealth management business models. In this two part blogpost, excerpted from our new book on FinTech forthcoming from Wiley in early 2017, we look at the potential of Robo-Advisors and offer some thoughts on valuation.

December 5, 2016 Transactions Trust Companies

Sterling National Regifts Trust Department to Midland

As inspiration for fair deals and perfect swaps, we looked into Midland State Bancorp’s recent acquisition of Sterling National Bank’s trust department. From what we’ve read about the deal, it appears both parties walked away with what they wanted.

November 28, 2016 Practice Management

Buy-Sell Agreements for Investment Management Firms

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure

As difficult it is to imagine a valuable car such as the Ferrari 250GT SWB that we feature in this post being forgotten, what we see more commonly are forgotten buy-sell agreements, collecting dust in desk drawers. Unfortunately, these contracts often turn into liabilities, instead of assets, once they are exhumed, as the words on the page frequently commit the signatories to obligations long forgotten. So we encourage our clients to review their buy-sell agreements regularly, and have compiled some of our observations about how to do so in the whitepaper. We hope this will be helpful to you; call us if you have any questions.

November 21, 2016 Current Events Transactions

U.K. Based Henderson Group Acquires Janus Capital for $2.6 Billion

Coming to America

Though probably not as historic as Plymouth landing or even the Eddie Murphy comedy, Henderson’s purchase of Denver RIA Janus Capital last month is a rare sign of confidence in active managers that have been losing ground to passive investors for quite some time. The era of ETFs and indexing has dominated asset flows for quite some time, so this transaction seems to counter the recent trend.

November 14, 2016 Current Events

What Donald Trump’s Presidency Means to the Investment Management Industry

The purpose of this blog is to consider the implications of the election for the investment management industry, which is no easy feat. The Trump campaign was generally heavy on rhetoric and light on policy details. The investment management industry rarely came up, other than when Trump suggested that he would advocate taxing carried interest returns as ordinary income. He never mentioned, for example, the DOL’s Fiduciary Rule, which is set to phase in three months after the inauguration. The clearest indication of what a Trump presidency means to financial services, so far, appears to be its impact on the banking industry.

November 7, 2016 Current Events

3Q16 Call Reports

The Times They are A-Changin’

As we do every quarter, we take a look at some of the earnings commentary of pacemakers in asset management to gain further insight into the challenges and opportunities developing in the industry. Some of the trends this quarter include the Department of Labor’s Fiduciary Rule, passive management favoritism, and industry consolidation.