State Street

Best Blogs of the Week #244

Posted by Anu Heda on Sep 06, 2016, in Best Blogs of the Week , tagged with , ,

Three excellent posts this week including a one-year post-mortem on the flash crash (Feels like many years ago).

Invesco – One Year Later– In the wake of last year’s volatility, many market participants pinned the blame on ill-conceived regulations and a lack of price visibility. Most agreed that something needed to be done to prevent another meltdown. One year later, has anything changed?

SSgA – 3 Reasons to Take a Look at Emerging Market Debt– But it’s important to understand that EM debt and EM equity are not the same. Over the past ten years, EM debt has more than doubled the return of EM equity, but with only one third the amount of volatility

Vanguard – 40 years of innovations in indexing – And the pitch for indexing wasn’t outperformance; it was to help investors minimize the cost of investing in a broad sense. If you think about it, not being broadly diversified has a cost, portfolio turnover generates transaction and tax costs, and, of course, active management advisory fees are a cost. Indexing hits at those headwinds straight on.

Dispersion for EM Debt via SSgA (not Flash Crash)

 

An Additional $0.02: 4 Thoughts on DB Market Share

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Sep 20, 2013, in Thoughts , tagged with , , ,

Sometimes when we get quoted in the press, I wish that we were able to be more expansive in our thoughts. I understand why that doesn’t happen in a reporter’s article, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it here.

Last week FundFire wrote a story on the market share decline for the top 10 managers in the US Defined Benefit space (35% in 2012, 32% in 2012). In the story we highlighted one very obvious and one moderately obvious conclusion from Cerulli’s data:

In the data, it’s clear that a lot of the net result is numerically derived from what’s happened at SSgA. That said, the relative market share of the top 10 ex-SSgA has also declined in the 2010-2012 timeframe.

So what if FundFire let us ramble on from there? Here are 4 thoughts we’d have added:

  1. It is somewhat arbitrary to draw the line at 10 firms in considering overall industry dynamics. As we see here, 1-2 firms can significantly influence conclusions.

  2. Plus, the US DB market is not very concentrated to begin with relative to numerous other industries. A 32% share among the top 10 with a severely long tail of assets spread across a large pool of niche providers makes the “top 10” a less meaningful group to focus on.

  3. A 3% decline likely does not indicate any clear trend in industry concentration.

  4. And finally, the very nature of the DB market dictates that institutions will always look for other/better options. As John Garibaldi from JPMorgan notes in the article, “[Institutions are] always looking to hire a specialist in every part of the capital market spectrum.”

Things can change of course, but until M&A runs rampant and/or margins squeeze smaller managers out of the business, I don’t perceive a much higher ceiling for the “top 10”.

Ignoring Price Means Firms Have to Play Defense

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Oct 22, 2010, in Thoughts , tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Part 2 in a series of posts regarding price competition.  Read Part 1 here.

In yesterday’s post, I suggested that price is an underutilized tool in mutual fund marketing. That the industry, while very price competitive, rarely makes that competition publicly explicit.  In light of the traditional 4P marketing mix, which Anu used to discuss PIMCO, this is like leaving 25% of the tools in the toolbox.

Of course, at one end of the spectrum you have a firm like Vanguard, where:

  • “Exceptional value”, which includes performance, service, and costs, is highlighted as a core reason to invest with the firm.

  • The words “low cost” appear consistently in marketing messages, including on the homepage of the advisor Web site.

Most every other mutual fund provider sits at the opposite end of the price-marketing spectrum.  In defining who they are, firms like Columbia, Invesco, DWS, Oppenheimer, and myriad others make no mention of fees/pricing/efficiency as part of their overall value proposition.

The danger in passive strategies toward price discussions is that they can eventually force firms to play defense.  Consider the responses of BlackRock and State Street to the recent fee reductions on Vanguard’s ETFs.  The answers are fine, but the discussion has those firms having to defend existing policies.  Without exceptional performance, “why do you charge X when another firm charges Y?” is a question nobody wants.

Introducing price more proactively is a chance for some firms to gain higher ground in marketing against the competition.  And there are subtle ways to do this.  Some tactical ideas to come next week…