Quantcast
The MFWire
Manage Email Alerts | Sponsorships | About MFWire | Who We Are

Subscribe to MFWire.com's News Alerts [click]

Rating:Sorry, Fundsters: Fees and Wholesalers Don't Sway RIAs Not Rated 0.0 Email Routing List Email & Route  Print Print
Thursday, September 7, 2017

Sorry, Fundsters: Fees and Wholesalers Don't Sway RIAs

Reported by Neil Anderson, Managing Editor

Low-cost funds are on the march and distribution is more important than ever, yet fees and wholesalers may not be the solution to all your RIA channel distribution woes, at least for active U.S. equity mutual funds. So suggests new research from Advisor Perspectives.

Drawing from its 17,000-member online community, APViewpoint, the publication just issued its first research, an 80-page report. They put together an online focus group with advisors from 30 large RIAs, all with at least $250 million in firm assets and at least a 10-percent allocation to actively-managed U.S. equities. The people in the focus group are all involved in their firms' selection and monitoring of such funds.

Only 6.7 percent of respondents described fees as the "key determinant" when pick active U.S. equity funds, compared to 43.3 percent who pointed to performance and 13.3 percent who pointed to volatility and risk.

"Advisors are relatively insensitive to expenses on those funds," Bob Huebscher, CEO of Advisor Perspectives, tells MFWire. "It's unlikely that it's going to pay to reduce expenses."

Firms that do have low expense ratios should naturally play that up in their marketing, Huebscher says, but other firms should instead push the importance of performance (which is net of fees) and should only consider cutting fees if they're way outside the norm.

And for firms looking to ramp up their field salesforce to boost distribution, Advisor Perspectives has some sobering findings. 70 percent of RIAs in the focus group said that fund firms' wholesalers have very little or no influence at all on their selection of active U.S. equity funds. Even worse, 46.7% percent of RIAs actually reacted negatively to contact from wholesalers, usually to emails or phone calls.

The full report digs into a host of other details and shows various responses (including direct quotes) from the RIAs in the focus group. Going forward, Advisor Perspectives will be doing more research (all available in full to those asset managers who sponsor the publication) on a quarterly basis. And they'll also be doing custom research for fundsters.

"One of the things that we now offer to those fund companies are online focus groups where they can conduct their own research and do their own focus groups on whatever topics that they want," Huebscher says, noting that such results are kept private and only shared with the fund firm sponsoring the research. 

Stay ahead of the news ... Sign up for our email alerts now
CLICK HERE

0.0
 Do You Recommend This Story?



GO TO: MFWire
Return to Top
 News Archives
2024: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2023: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2022: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2021: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2020: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2019: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2018: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2017: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2016: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2015: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2014: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2013: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2012: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2011: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2010: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2009: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2008: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2007: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2006: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2005: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2004: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2003: Q4Q3Q2Q1
2002: Q4Q3Q2Q1
 Subscribe via RSS:
Raw XML
Add to My Yahoo!
follow us in feedly




©All rights reserved to InvestmentWires, Inc. 1997-2024
14 Wall Street | 20th Floor | New York, NY 10005 | P: 212-331-8968 | F: 212-331-8998
Privacy Policy :: Terms of Use