A weekly update on issues important to the Investment Management industry
We’re always perplexed by the lack of transactions in the RIA industry. Sure, there are some out there, but a typical year reports less than a hundred deals in a space with almost 12,000 federally registered advisors. This means that less than 1% of industry participants transact in a given year. How could that be in an aging profession with a highly scalable business model? We offer a few explanations in this week’s post.
Most traditional asset managers (also sharing the TAM initials), a similarly consistent, yet overlooked subset of the RIA industry, are in bull market territory over the last year in the face of fee compression and continued outflows from active equity products.
All classes of asset managers are off to a decent start in 2017 after a strong end to 2016 as the market weighs the impact of fee compression against rising equity prices.
This week, we take a break in our musings on asset manager valuations and impractical sports cars to share some recent media on trends in the RIA space we’ve been following.
Normally, we would expect strong financial markets to validate most RIA models and at least hide the weaknesses of others. In this case, though, a rising tide isn’t lifting all the boats. Why? In this post, we pinpoint the reasons why and discuss a way forward.
One refrain we often hear from clients is how different they are from other investment management firms. We agree. Asset managers have a lot in common, but we see a huge variety of personalities, investment approaches, business plans, marketing activities, compensation models, etc. In short, every firm has a unique culture, just like families.
The stock market rallied in the first five months of the year, with the Dow Jones and S&P 500 reaching record highs and continuing to climb. Nevertheless, IPOs remain scarce compared to prior years.
A question that we don’t hear enough RIAs asking themselves: what makes our best customer? The conventional wisdom we’ve gathered from talking with a wide variety of investment management firms over the years is that high net worth relationships make the best clients for RIAs. Relationships with individuals are supposed to be stickier than, say, institutional relationships where investment committees drop managers the moment their three-year performance lags the index. However, is it that simple?
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.
As part of the analyst community that closely follows developments in the investment management industry, we were disappointed (but not surprised) that Focus Financial Partners pulled their S-1, again, and found a private equity recap partner instead of going public. Picking up on last week’s blog theme, Focus likes to tout their strategy of building an international network of efficiently connected wealth management firms as an “unfair advantage”, but it appears that their real capability is finding capital when necessary to avoid a public offering. Stone Point Capital and KKR bought 70% of the company, enabling prior private equity partners, affiliates who had sold their firms to Focus in exchange for stock, and employees with equity compensation to monetize their positions while Focus remains private.
