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A great opening line: "shrewd salesmanship can overcome mediocre investment returns." Someone is frantically pedaling what they know to be mediocre investments, and succeeding because the investors believe that they can trust their advisers' judgment, objectivity and sense of fiduciary obligation. (Oops.)
This is old news, and somewhat distorted statistics. If what you care about is mutual fund AUM, then JPMorgan was in the top four in Nov 2009 (so it's hardly news that they broke into the top 10). CBS News citing Investment News, reporting data from M*.
The difference is that the latter included ETFs and MMFs; the Bloomberg report explicitly excludes MMFs, but is silent about ETFs (which are not mutual funds); the text also talks about stock and bond funds, which would seem to exclude real estate funds (REITs aren't stocks), MLPs (e.g. SteelPath), currency, etc. Not that these adds up to a whole lot, but it could be enough to affect rankings.
I suspect that if one looks hard enough, one can find a moment in time when Columbia funds broke into the top 10, while owned by BofA. (It's usually around 11-12, but if one is excluding MMFs, where Columbia is weak, it is quite conceivable that BofA broke into the top ten even by this metric, prior to divesting Columbia May 2010.) Then there's Barclays, formerly the owner of iShares (which doesn't have MMFs, so the CBS/Investment News list showing iShares in the top five also shows another bank in the top 10, prior to this year, excluding MMFs).
With respect to advisors' sense of fiduciary responsibility - the advisors may be senseless, but the standard is an objective one. The real problem IMHO is that people are trusting brokers, who so far have managed to avoid being held to that objective standard. And mediocre funds are definitely "suitable" for investors, even if they aren't the "best" investments around. That's all a broker has to do for a customer.
Comments
David
The difference is that the latter included ETFs and MMFs; the Bloomberg report explicitly excludes MMFs, but is silent about ETFs (which are not mutual funds); the text also talks about stock and bond funds, which would seem to exclude real estate funds (REITs aren't stocks), MLPs (e.g. SteelPath), currency, etc. Not that these adds up to a whole lot, but it could be enough to affect rankings.
I suspect that if one looks hard enough, one can find a moment in time when Columbia funds broke into the top 10, while owned by BofA. (It's usually around 11-12, but if one is excluding MMFs, where Columbia is weak, it is quite conceivable that BofA broke into the top ten even by this metric, prior to divesting Columbia May 2010.) Then there's Barclays, formerly the owner of iShares (which doesn't have MMFs, so the CBS/Investment News list showing iShares in the top five also shows another bank in the top 10, prior to this year, excluding MMFs).
With respect to advisors' sense of fiduciary responsibility - the advisors may be senseless, but the standard is an objective one. The real problem IMHO is that people are trusting brokers, who so far have managed to avoid being held to that objective standard. And mediocre funds are definitely "suitable" for investors, even if they aren't the "best" investments around. That's all a broker has to do for a customer.