Did you know that World Investment Advisors recently acquired a Raymond James RIA with $3.5 billion in assets under management? Or that AssetMark is acquiring $12 billion in client assets from Morningstar? Or that Craig Hawley has been hired to run Nationwide’s annuity business?
You might be interested to know that Arkadios Capital recruited a former LPL team that manages $850 million in client assets. Or here’s one: Blackrock expects active ETF assets to reach $4 trillion by 2030. And by the way, LPL recruited Summit Planning Group away from Lincoln Financial. Summit is described as a $750 million team.
Why am I bombarding you with useless information? Because these are actual headlines pulled randomly from our industry publications—and believe me, there are a lot more. Whenever one broker-dealer recruits an office from another, we are told about it. Wirehouse teams that leave to join broker-dealers get their own article. Rollup and private equity acquisitions are headline news—if they involve more than $500 million in investible assets, anyway.
And in between, there are predictions and a lot of boasting from the largest investment management firms and custodians, who like to keep their names in the news. Executive hires are very important for you to be aware of.
How do these irrelevant stories (to most of you, anyway) find their way into our trade and professional press? I can tell you that when I was editor of Financial Planning magazine, I discovered that there is a whole public relations ecosystem churning out favorable press releases and miscellaneous announcements that they would position as ‘news.’ My immediate reaction was to wad them up and toss them in the circular file behind my desk.
Today, the publications publish them verbatim. It’s a lazy (and inexpensive, dare I say cheap?) way to fill space on the professional press websites. Let the PR factories write the news for you. They know what’s best for your readers. All you have to do is ask the companies that hire them.
You might think this is a rant about old-fashioned journalist values, or some such thing, but my point is much bigger than that. In its efforts to ‘fill space,’ our current professional/trade media is forcing its advisor consumers to wade through a lot of articles and material that they know is of no value to them, their firms, or their careers, and spend valuable time seeking out what might be relevant. Of course, over the years, there have also been fewer relevant articles; my Media Reviews service started decades ago as a way to synthesize all the published information that advisors were too busy to read on their own. Now it functions more as a filter, as a way to reduce the clutter so that the (very) few relevant articles can be found without undue (unnecessary) effort.
In that bygone day when I sat in an editor’s desk, there was always an edge of panic and discouragement coming from the PR people who tried to get me on the phone to ‘follow up’ on the ‘perspective that my readers would be interested in.’ They experienced rejection on a routine basis, and the writers I knew who moved over to the PR side (more money!) soon realized that they were in the cold calling business. (Less job satisfaction!)
Today, the PR people rule, and the writers—regarded as unnecessarily expensive, whose material is much more costly to post than the pre-written copy that comes in for free—are the downtrodden ones. They’re expected to write two or three articles a month on preconceived topics and are told not to piss off the advertisers—or the audience. They make a few calls, write up whatever they’re told, and, well, if you don’t believe me on this, just LOOK at their articles in between the PR screeds.
We’re experiencing, in real time, a decline in relevancy from our trade and professional press—PR ascendency, writer decline, fewer insights and new ideas almost nonexistent. This decreasingly relevant text is used to lure you into an environment where they can sell your attention to their advertisers.
I was told during an interview recently what a remarkable achievement it is for me to be able to charge a subscription fee for the information I provide, when there is so much free information out there. And I asked this person: how much of that free information is actually valuable? Are there free insights and ideas and in-depth reporting on important topics that I’m somehow missing?
And then I realized what is the point of this rant. My subscription service is paid for by the user, just like fee-only advisors are paid by their clients. The trade and professional press is paid for by advertisers and promoters—who also, by the way, pay the PR people to fill those pages. Their incentives and model are similar to commission-based advisors, whose service inevitably revolves around products that may or may not be in the best interests of their customers.
If there is going to be a renaissance of good information in our space, then I think it is going to have to be paid for directly. Conflicts of interest never lead to positive results, and there’s no reason why my field of journalism should be any different.