JPMorgan

Best Blogs of the Week

Posted by Anu Heda on Dec 22, 2014, in Best Blogs of the Week , tagged with , , , ,

We close in on the New Year and multiple more “2015 outlooks” pop up. We won’t bore you with any of them though. We noted over 10 posts related to oil prices this week, showing the industry’s continued capability to respond nimbly towards headline news.

  • Franklin Templeton – Though highly technical, we found this the most thorough and singularly helpful post related to oil prices.
  • JPMorgan – Quick hits on the year in review. Not scintillating yet highly effective.
  • Principal – A post for retirement plan sponsors; fantastic. I appreciate question four and continue to see a large gap in participant education throughout the value chain.
  • Vanguard – This post on explaining ETFs hits a particular note with us. In our proprietary research, we proved that a large FA population continues to avoid ETFs primarily because of missing education and a lack of knowledge.
  • WisdomTree – Excellent post on alternative investing and the impacts from macroeconomic factors (including oil prices!)

Best Blogs of the Week

Posted by Anu Heda on Aug 18, 2014, in Best Blogs of the Week , tagged with , ,

Three posts this week, including a first-timer (second week in  row).

  • JPMorgan – Clear delineation between unconstrained and absolute return
  • Oppenheimer – The Kinder Morgan transaction showed up 3 times in the blog we track. This was the clearest relationship between transaction and funds’ future.
  • Weitz – I can only imagine how many calls were placed this spring; from investors to their FAs asking about high-frequency trading. This post describes HFT well.

An Additional $0.02: 4 Thoughts on DB Market Share

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Sep 20, 2013, in Thoughts , tagged with , , ,

Sometimes when we get quoted in the press, I wish that we were able to be more expansive in our thoughts. I understand why that doesn’t happen in a reporter’s article, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it here.

Last week FundFire wrote a story on the market share decline for the top 10 managers in the US Defined Benefit space (35% in 2012, 32% in 2012). In the story we highlighted one very obvious and one moderately obvious conclusion from Cerulli’s data:

In the data, it’s clear that a lot of the net result is numerically derived from what’s happened at SSgA. That said, the relative market share of the top 10 ex-SSgA has also declined in the 2010-2012 timeframe.

So what if FundFire let us ramble on from there? Here are 4 thoughts we’d have added:

  1. It is somewhat arbitrary to draw the line at 10 firms in considering overall industry dynamics. As we see here, 1-2 firms can significantly influence conclusions.

  2. Plus, the US DB market is not very concentrated to begin with relative to numerous other industries. A 32% share among the top 10 with a severely long tail of assets spread across a large pool of niche providers makes the “top 10” a less meaningful group to focus on.

  3. A 3% decline likely does not indicate any clear trend in industry concentration.

  4. And finally, the very nature of the DB market dictates that institutions will always look for other/better options. As John Garibaldi from JPMorgan notes in the article, “[Institutions are] always looking to hire a specialist in every part of the capital market spectrum.”

Things can change of course, but until M&A runs rampant and/or margins squeeze smaller managers out of the business, I don’t perceive a much higher ceiling for the “top 10”.