A weekly update on issues important to the Investment Management industry
Ever since the Financial Crisis, wirehouse advisors have been pondering this question as the independent model continues to lure wealth managers from the big banks and brokerage firms. This post discusses the various options that financial advisors (FAs) are faced with today and when it makes sense for them to stick around or do their own thing.
Of all the topics we cover in RIA Valuation Insights, the most popular concerns what an investment management firm is actually worth. As a consequence, we thought it would be worthwhile to offer a webinar on the topic, and are planning to do so on Tuesday, October 3.
This week we’re sharing some recent media on trends in asset management and the outlook for M&A activity. Most industry observers foresee an uptick in asset manager deal-making as rising costs, asset outflows, and a heightened interest from consolidators incent many firms to pull the trigger on a sale or business combination with another RIA.
If you’re considering an offer for your firm that includes earn-out consideration, think about having some independent analysis done on the offer to see what it might ultimately be worth to you. If you’re working the buy-side, prepare to spend lots of time fine-tuning the earn-out agreement—you won’t get credit if things go well for the seller, but you will get blamed if it doesn’t.
We continue the discussion of earn-outs in the RIA industry. While there is no one set of rules for structuring an earn-out, there are a few conceptual issues that can help anchor the negotiation. We list five in this week’s post.
This blog kicks off a series which we’ll ultimately condense into a whitepaper to explore and maybe demystify some of the issues surrounding earn-outs in RIA transactions. If nothing else, earn-outs make for great stories.
This week, we’re sharing some recent media on trends in the RIA space. We’ve blogged about asset flows, bank interest in the RIA space, the plight of active management, and the fiduciary rule, but these articles represent a deeper dive into each of these topics.
As we do every quarter, we take a look at some of the earnings commentary on pacemakers in asset management to gain further insight into the challenges and opportunities developing in the 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.
