Fees falling as funds fight for market share
Morgan Stanley stock analysts predict that midsize money managers will be most affected.
Fidelity Investments may have led the way with no-fee index funds this past summer, but the battle for investors’ wallets hasn’t stopped there.
According to a Reuters report, investors could be saving “billions” every year as money managers keep cutting fees in an effort to keep customers—and gain new ones.
In fact, says the report, “Some analysts see a future with negative fee index funds, where investors get paid a small amount for investing money.”
The report cites Morningstar analyst Ben Johnson saying that the fee cuts are a democratizing force for small investors. “Mom and pop are getting what large institutions get,” he’s quoted saying.
Index funds have seen the biggest cuts, but now big cuts could also hit actively managed stock and bond funds.
The latter two funds have hung onto relatively high expense ratios even as investors turned to cheaper options such as index and exchange-traded funds.
And money managers who depend on actively managed funds are already feeling the financial pinch, with more pressure on the way.
“It is inevitable that active management sees this reality of investors going to lower cost products,” Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF and mutual fund research at CFRA, is quoted saying in the report. Rosenbluth adds, “They will bring down pricing to being only modestly above index funds versus being significantly higher.”
And that can add up, even if it’s only hundredths of a point.
According to the report, investors saved about $4 billion in 2017 on a U.S. fund asset base of more than $22 trillion with an overall drop in asset-weighted fund fees to 0.52 percent from 0.56 percent. Says the report, “The 8 percent annual decline was the biggest since research firm Morningstar Inc, started tracking those fees in 2000,”
Morgan Stanley stock analysts predict that midsize money managers will be doing much of the suffering as fees continue to fall.
The report cites a Morgan Stanley base case forecast for fee income for Waddell & Reed Financial Inc. and Janus Henderson Group plc to decline 16 percent and 15 percent, respectively, during the next three years.
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