(New York)

Anybody who is worried about a pending bond bear market might take some solace in recent news. Bond markets are becoming increasingly skeptical of the Fed’s bullish stance on the economy, and traders believe there won’t be nearly as many rate hikes as the Fed says. The US has just seen a weak inflation report, and a flattening of the yield curve, both at home and in the Eurodollar market, spells ill for the economy. So while the Fed says it will continue to hike rates into 2020, top market analysts are saying things like “The markets are telling us that there is a pretty high risk of economic slowdown or recession at the end of 2019” (Janney Capital Management).

FINSUM: We think the economy will definitely start to weaken before 2020. Perhaps we will not have a deep recession, but we definitely don’t think there will be continuous hikes for the next year and a half, which is good news for bonds.

(New York)

There is no denying it, small cap stocks are having their moment in the sun. The Russell 2000 is up over 10% this year, while the S&P 500 is up only 3.2%. A number of factors are powering them: tax cuts that benefit small companies more than large ones, better US than overseas growth, and a rising Dollar amid heightening trade disputes. In light of this, the WSJ has picked 3 small cap stock funds for investors to consider. They are: DFA US Small Cap Value Portfolio, T. Rowe Price QM U.S. Small-Cap Growth Equity Fund, and the Harbor Small Cap Value Fund.

FINSUM: Reading about their strategies, the T.Rowe offering looks particularly interesting and has the best five-year annualized return of 14.6%.

(New York)

In what certainly seems to be a sign of health for the industry, RIA average account sizes just hit a new high. The average client at a US RIA now has an account averaging $2m (at firms with over $250m in AUM). This is the first time the figure has ever crossed the $2m threshold. Median AUM for firms grew over 16% in 2017, with average revenue increasing to $3.6m. The stats come from an annual Charles Schwab survey, with the firm saying about the healthy results “Firms are fueling their organic growth by differentiating and marketing their value propositions, improving the client experience and strategically expanding their service offerings to meet the needs of their ideal clients”.

FINSUM: The fiduciary duty of RIAs seems to be a differentiated and continued source of new client demand. It is a testament to the quality of RIAs in this country.

(New York)

The media is reacting very strongly to a new move by Morningstar. The legendary fund rating company has just taken the somewhat surprising move of replacing outside funds with some of its own in its “managed portfolio service”, which allows financial advisors to outsource investment decisions to Morningstar. It will now rely on its own funds as the building blocks of those portfolios. Its own funds will be scored by the company itself, but it says an algorithm will do this. The company’s CIO says “We have structures in place to make sure [investment management] is at arm’s length from research. There is structural separation of research and investment management”.

FINSUM: We think this is a ridiculous conflict of interest, made even sillier by the fact that Morningstar acts like an algorithm is any less biased than a human rating system. As if Morningstar did not write the algorithm in the first place…

(New York)

As fees fall, there is an inevitable reality in the US asset management industry—scale is everything. Investors need to deeply understand this concern if they have money in the sector. For instance, analysts and the market are putting so much preference on large managers, that one analyst just upgraded BlackRock to outperform, while downgrading Invesco and WisdomTree, even though BlackRock’s P/E ratio is 18.6, and the latter two’s are an average of just over 10. BlackRock’s stock is down 15% in the last year, while Invesco and WisdomTree have both fallen more than 30%.

FINSUM: The more fees need to be cut because of competition, the more money one needs under management to maintain profitability. Hence the battle for scale.