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Who knew ?!?!?! For once, I would like all news channels to post an article on this every week. When you feel like publishing "who killed marilyn monroe?" when nothing else remotely interesting is happening, make sure you tell your readers about *this*
What a complete nonstory this is, and she's a data investigator?? And yet another misleading hed.
Her management fee is low. Her fund fees are low. Her total is lowish.
Not to defend this sort of thing, but seriously.
And she coulda found all this out with only a little work. The first c/s person screwed up. But I bet she could've found out online that this firm has a low client fee, 0.85%. Some people in my family are like 1.1% now. And fund fees are readily available at M* and everywhere else.
Lame, lame journalism.
Whether there should be any such fees at this level, and what they should be if not, well, that's a story. But not this one. Opaque? Hardly.
She comes off as a bit of a snowflake. Should handholding and guidance and judgment and execution be free?
I agree that the article was lame. More column inches to fill. Fuller complained that she couldn't get an "all in" figure (including underlying fund fees) from her adviser. I guess looking up these figures (as David suggested), computing a dollar-weighted average, and adding them to 0.85% exceeded her ability as a specialist in data analysis.
The Bloomberg piece is disingenuous. It states that the fees are "quasi" hidden (e.g. in plain sight if one looks at prospectuses rather than at brokerage statements). Yet it accepts without question that even this "hiding" is too much for a professional to deal with: "If even a seasoned financial reporter has to spend hours just to find out the price that she’s paying ..."
She is a complete amateur in this realm, as was plain from her response to me when I crabbed to her. She admitted as much but did tell me how much positive response she has gotten from co-workers who are in the same pickle. Oi. And it coulda been a good article. I usually see way better from Bloomberg.
While Bloomberg called her a "seasoned financial reporter", in her WSJ article Fuller states up front that "I don’t have a finance beat".
Her WSJ bio talks about her work process (with spreadsheets and databases), but virtually nothing about domain (subject area) expertise, i.e. her beats. It only says that she began by working on stories "related to education data" and that she reports on data. Nothing I see there about data acquisition skills, just data analysis and graphing.
\\\ Thanks for your note. I appreciate all feedback -- even critical feedback! My job here at The Journal involves programming in Python and doing database analysis in SQL for stories on the investigative team. I don't work with a lot of personal finance stories, or data, so I didn't know much about this area. (For instance, I have written a lot about student debt.) I found these fees very confusing, but I'm glad you don't! I have heard from a number of readers who have shared my plight. But I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the story.
Well, I guess apprentices deserve a chance. Then again, why quit your day job? Not sure I want to read her articles on student debt either. She just said she had a written a lot on that subject, which says nothing about how well she knows the problem.
Comments
Her management fee is low. Her fund fees are low. Her total is lowish.
Not to defend this sort of thing, but seriously.
And she coulda found all this out with only a little work. The first c/s person screwed up. But I bet she could've found out online that this firm has a low client fee, 0.85%.
Some people in my family are like 1.1% now. And fund fees are readily available at M* and everywhere else.
Lame, lame journalism.
Whether there should be any such fees at this level, and what they should be if not, well, that's a story. But not this one. Opaque? Hardly.
She comes off as a bit of a snowflake. Should handholding and guidance and judgment and execution be free?
(No follow up discussion, just Ted's links including link to original WSJ article.)
I agree that the article was lame. More column inches to fill. Fuller complained that she couldn't get an "all in" figure (including underlying fund fees) from her adviser. I guess looking up these figures (as David suggested), computing a dollar-weighted average, and adding them to 0.85% exceeded her ability as a specialist in data analysis.
The Bloomberg piece is disingenuous. It states that the fees are "quasi" hidden (e.g. in plain sight if one looks at prospectuses rather than at brokerage statements). Yet it accepts without question that even this "hiding" is too much for a professional to deal with: "If even a seasoned financial reporter has to spend hours just to find out the price that she’s paying ..."
Her WSJ bio talks about her work process (with spreadsheets and databases), but virtually nothing about domain (subject area) expertise, i.e. her beats. It only says that she began by working on stories "related to education data" and that she reports on data. Nothing I see there about data acquisition skills, just data analysis and graphing.
\\\ Thanks for your note. I appreciate all feedback -- even critical feedback!
My job here at The Journal involves programming in Python and doing database analysis in SQL for stories on the investigative team. I don't work with a lot of personal finance stories, or data, so I didn't know much about this area. (For instance, I have written a lot about student debt.) I found these fees very confusing, but I'm glad you don't! I have heard from a number of readers who have shared my plight.
But I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the story.
I'm now going to go to someone else's house and learn to be a plumber at his expense. Eventually if I get it right, I'll work on my own sink.