Tag Archives: fidelity

Survey Says: Retail Investors Need An ETF Education

March 25, 2015 MarketsMuse Staff Reporter Leave a comment

MarketMuse update profiles a recent study done by Fidelity Investments and BlackRock, inc., have discovered a huge reason why retail investors are not comfortable investing in ETFs. The study which survey 1,000 individual investors and 250 advisors found that in order for retail investors to get on board the ETF train, they need some basic ETF education. MarketMuse update is courtesy of Nasdaq’s article, “ETF Watch: Retail Investors Still Shy Away From ETFs“, an a excerpt from the article is below.

The exchange-traded funds or ETFs, are lagging in popularity among retail investors due primarily to the lack of familiarity with the investment products, according to a new study.

While the ETF industry in the U.S. has grow at a breakneck pace to more than $2 trillion in assets in just more than two decades, most of that interest has come from institutional investors.

Two-thirds of retail investors have not yet moved ETFs in their portfolios.

The study revealed that the key to further growth for ETF adoption among retail investors and advisors lies in educating them on ETF basics.

“While ETF investments have more than doubled in the last five years , there is still significant opportunity to raise awareness as more than two-thirds of investors report they have yet to tap the potential benefits of ETFs in their portfolios,” said Andrew Brownsword, SVP Fidelity retail brokerage. “ETF adoption will keep growing.”

The study showed that current ETF owners are increasingly turning to ETFs for long-term holdings, while 80 percent of them see benefit in combining ETFs and mutual funds in a portfolio.

To read the entire article from Nasdaq, click here.

Tech Talk

Interest in Buyside-Only Equity Trading Platforms Gains Traction..Again..

February 24, 2015 MarketsMuse Staff Reporter Leave a comment

MarketsMuse update courtesy of extract from Pension & Investments Feb 23 edition, with story reported by Sophie Baker …MM Editor Note: The notion of buyside-only electronic trading venues for institutional equities (i.e. block trading) is not a new one. Graybeards who have been around for more than 15 minutes will say “First came Instinet, then there was Optimark….”both were spearheaded by trading pioneer Bill Lupien, and while Instinet quickly became the platform for all to trade NASDAQ stocks, Optimark was determined to be a black box for block trading available to buysiders only…and burned through nearly $100 million before it was sent to the wood chipper. Proving that history repeats itself and that innovation doesn’t need to be an original idea, as Yogi Berra would say “ Its Déjà vu All Over Again.”

The development of buy side-owned equity trading venues has attracted interest from long-term investors.

U.S.-based Luminex Analytics & Trading LLC, set to open for business this year, and Europe-based Plato Partnership Ltd. are being developed against a backdrop of increased pressure on costs, regulatory demand for best execution, recent regulatory investigations into the U.S. dark pools operated by banks, and concerns about some participants in existing dark pools.

“We manage our equity exposure largely internally, and we also do the trading internally,” said Thijs Aaten, managing director, treasury and trading, at APG Asset Management, Amsterdam, Netherlands. The firm has €400 billion ($453.3 billion) in assets under management, including the €344 billion pension fund ABP, Heerlen, Netherlands.

“I’m definitely willing to consider new venues that we can trade on. If there is an advantage to it, then it would be silly not to make use of it. It is our fiduciary duty, and if there is a new opportunity, we have to investigate.”

Luminex is a buy side-to-buy side trading venue owned by a consortium of nine money managers, representing a total of about $15 trillion under management: Fidelity Investments, BlackRock (BLK) Inc. (BLK), Bank of New York Mellon (BK) Corp. (BK), The Capital Group Cos. Inc., Invesco (IVZ) Ltd., J.P. Morgan Asset Management (JPM), MFS Investment Management, State Street Global Advisors and T. Rowe Price Group Inc.

Managers declined to disclose their financial commitments.

Plato’s consortium includes two money managers: Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management and Norges Bank Investment Management, manager of the 6.6 trillion Norwegian kroner ($870 billion) Government Pension Fund Global, Oslo. “We believe we will be naming more firms in coming months,” said Stephen McGoldrick, project director, Plato Partnership, in London.

Both venues were created to give long-only money managers and institutional investors back the power they need to fulfill their best execution requirements, and to ultimately save costs for their clients when trading large blocks of securities.

APG is keen to trade with long-term asset holders, Mr. Aaten said. “(That type of trader,) taking a fundamental but opposite view on the same company, is the cheapest to trade with. But finding that long-term trader is difficult. This is what those new, buy side-to-buy side platforms are about — helping to find those long-term asset owners, (which) will lower our trading costs.”

He said the traditional model, where the sell side acts as a go-between for buyer and seller, and high-frequency traders are admitted, is more expensive. High-frequency traders “don’t have a fundamental view on an equity, but trade on information from the order book. Because of technological advantages they have this information before I do … in our experience, they are the most expensive type of trader to trade against,” Mr. Aaten said.

Self-sustaining

“The consortium’s goal is that Luminex will become self-sustaining, offering its clients a low-cost, fully transparent trading venue for large peer-to-peer block orders, preserving as much alpha as possible for the trading partners’ clients,” said Jeff Estella, director, global equity trading at MFS in Boston.

A BlackRock (BLK) spokesman said company officials believe “alternative trading platforms are invaluable execution tools for investors seeking to avoid information leakage and reduce market impact,” and a spokesman for Fidelity said Luminex “will be focused on helping the investment management community more efficiently source block liquidity.”

Excess cash flow will be reinvested in Luminex, rather than making a profit for the consortium.

Being designed as non-profit-making entities for the members of the consortiums is a key point in the platforms’ favor, said sources.

Plato’s consortium members have goals similar to those for Luminex.

“The consortium’s key aims for this project are to reduce trading costs, simplify market structure and to act as a champion for end investors — a vision which we firmly back,” said Oyvind Schanke, Oslo-based chief investment officer, asset strategies, at NBIM.

Buy side and sell side Plato participants will have equal say on key decisions, and the model was developed with an eye on European regulation, said Mr. McGoldrick.

The intention is to open Luminex to other long-only managers, but there are requirements. This new platform will require a commitment from users of a minimum block size of 5,000 shares or a value of $100,000, whichever is smaller, said a spokesman for Luminex.

Execution guaranteed

Should an order be matched, it is guaranteed to execute. Users also can increase the size of their block trade. Hedge funds that abide by the same rules are permitted on the platform, but not high-frequency traders.

Still, liquidity and the likelihood of finding a match are two issues that hang over the success of Luminex and other buy side-to-buy side platforms.

To continue reading the full story from P&I, please click here.

Tech Talk

Dark Pool Tales Part 3: Fidelity Leads Buy Side-Only Initiative For Block Equities

January 20, 2015 MarketsMuse Staff Reporter Leave a comment

In what has become an ongoing “trilogy-type” story straight out of Hollywood, the WSJ reports today that Fidelity Investments is set to launch yet the latest “dark pool” initiative via a consortium of and exclusively for buy-side investment managers. The announcement comes on the heels of a recently-profiled NYSE initiative [with a strategy to partner with leading investment banks that operate their own dark pools and otherwise bring back the block trade volume taking place away from the NYSE in consideration for lower fees] and a competing NASDAQ initiative that comes with a completely different pricing scheme in effort to capture market share.

MarketsMuse Senior Editor quips: “We’ve seen ‘buy-side only’ schemes before for both equities and fixed income. Bottom line: they’ve all wound up on the cutting room floor.”

Here’s the extract from WSJ reporting, courtesy of Kirsten Grind: Continue reading →

ETF News

Pre-Thanksgiving Special: Custodians Flip The Bird to RIA Customers Seeking ETF Best Execution

November 21, 2013 MarketsMuse Staff Reporter Leave a comment

Courtesy of RIABiz and reporter Lisa Shidler

MarketsMuse Editor Note: Kudos to Lisa “Lois Lane” Shidler for her insightful expose profiling how custodians to RIAs excel at squeezing lemons from customers who they must think are lemmings. Though Ms. Schilder neglected to spotlight the fact that custodians systematically sell their customer orders to select principal trading firms (e.g KCG) who cherry-pick orders they can exploit for trading profit, her insight i.e. the practice of imposing exorbitant trade-away fees on those very same customers who seek to secure the real best prices via independent execution only firms is a topic worthy of sharing this story with industry regulators. Too bad those latter folks don’t get it…perhaps because they’re beholden to the biggest custodians in the industry?

Here are a few excerpts:

The big four RIA custodians are now charging advisory firms giant new fees — in the tens of thousands in some cases — relating to some ETF purchases.

Schwab Advisor Services, TD Ameritrade Institutional, Pershing Advisor Solutions LLC and Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services are levying what are known as “trade-away” fees to RIA firms that buy exchange traded funds through a broker-dealer other than the one owned by the custodian. The advisor typically chooses to use these third parties because they believe that RIA custodians are executing trades poorly along the bid-ask curve and forcing them to make ETF purchases at unacceptably high prices.

At first blush the fees look fairly benign. The fee at Fidelity is a $20 fee per account per trade. TD Ameritrade charges $25 per account. Pershing’s fee ranges from $8 to $20 per account depending on the volume of the trade. Schwab declined to disclose its fee through its spokesman, Greg Gable.

These fees have put RIAs like Chris Romano, director of research and trading with Fusion Investments Group LLC in Pittsburgh invests, in a bind in certain instances.

Though his firm manages about $139 million in assets, the bulk of them are institutional and banks custody them. Fusion advises for other RIAs but those assets are held away. In short, his firm manages just $11 million of mostly ETFs with Fidelity’s RIA custody platform, which means Fidelity’s $20 fee is too costly for the size of trades that he does.

“We don’t even consider trading away [in effort to get best execution] at Fidelity because of the high ticket trade away fee,” Romano says. “On the smaller account sizes, it can be a really significant fee. If the fee is $20, that can really add up.” Continue reading →

ETF News, People Profiles

Fidelity Snags State Street ETF Czar: Rumors Abound

March 9, 2012 MarketsMuse Staff Reporter Leave a comment

In a “if you can’t beat ’em, poach ’em” moment, mutual fund monster Fidelity Investments has apparently thrown in the towel and will finally focus on running their own actively-managed sector-specific ETFs. At least that’s the obvious conclusion being drawn by industry watchers after news of Fidelity, which still only offers one house-branded ETF, announced the hiring of former employee Tony Rochte, who left Fidelity after four years in 2000 to seek his fortunes in the wild west days of ETF pioneering.

The widely-respected Rochte spent his next six years at BlackRock’s bootcamp carrying the iShares flag, and the most recent six years as Senior MD over at State Street Global, where he helped the second largest ETF issuer become, well, the second largest ETF issuer.

According to InvestmentNews:With Mr. Rochte’s background in ETFs and his new role running a division focused on sector investments, it seems like a no-brainer to some that Fidelity would re-launch those strategies as active ETFs.

“It would be a logical next step,” said Robert Goldsborough, an ETF analyst at Morningstar Inc. “Given that the sector funds already exist and they’re popular with advisers, it would make a tremendous amount of sense to move that competency over to ETFs.” Duh!