海角大神

I was very proud of my industry when I saw this article over at Investment News about how the large money managers are constructing portfolios in a brand-agnostic way.聽 This is how asset management for the sake of the client is meant to be done:

Clearly you're seeing this type of thing because these large purveyors of asset management products are smart enough to realize that they don't each have the best-in-class suite of funds for every asset class.聽 They are responsible, in the end, for performance and part of that responsibility means keeping fees low and choosing holdings that are the most efficient and utilitarian toward a specific outcome.聽 I'm sure Pimco could start their own version of GLD tomorrow, but it would not serve their clients' purposes or their own or the market in general.聽 It would be a less-liquid, higher-cost product by the very nature of its construction.聽 So Pimco does the right thing and uses the SPDR version like everyone else.

In the old days, when Morgan and Merrill and Smith Barney were still relevant, you would never have seen this kind of sharing and cooperation.聽 Everything had to have the firm's name on it and you could never recommend the fund of a competitor - the clearing department of your firm wouldn't even hold another firm's fund if you tried to transfer it in!聽 "Liquidate Upon Transfer" would be scrawled across the paperwork!

But those Border War days are at an end.

The walls are coming down, slowly but surely.聽 The resistance to change is melting and the embracing of holistic asset management with the clients coming first is at hand.

Way to go, guys.