The ongoing decline in interest rates since the financial crisis have been a boon for those looking to refinance a mortgage or businesses looking to borrow, but an immense challenge for investors that rely on fixed income returns, from insurance companies to individual accumulators and retirees. And as bond returns grind lower, it has brought a renewed focus on costs (that eat up an ever-larger percentage of a smaller return), including the question of whether financial advisors should charge less for managing a bond portfolio compared to a stock portfolio.
In this week’s #OfficeHours with @MichaelKitces, my Tuesday 1PM EST broadcast via Periscope, we look at the question of whether advisors really should be charging separate and different fees on the fixed income versus equity allocations in a portfolio, including and especially for those who also deliver extensive financial planning services as a part of their AUM fee as well.
Of course, given that the typical bond mutual fund is already less expensive than the average stock mutual fund, arguably the asset management industry has already spoken and suggested that the fees should not be the same. If only because today's low bond yields, plus the more limited volatility of bonds (at least compared to stocks), means there's just only so much opportunity to create active management value in bonds and outearn that fee in the first place.
On the other hand, the reality is that most advisors don't manage just all-bond or all-stock portfolios as a mutual fund does. Advisors typically manage blended portfolios of stocks and bonds, sometimes tactically managing amongst all those asset classes, and an increasingly large portion of the AUM fee is being allocated to financial planning services anyway... which are based on the amount of actual financial planning work to be done, and arguably remain the same regardless of how the portfolio happens to be invested.
And in fact, with the looming Department of Labor fiduciary rule taking effect in April of 2017, charging different fees for stock versus bond allocations may become a prohibited transaction anyway, at least in an IRA where the advisor has discretion over the portfolio's overall allocation in the first place. Which means that while advisors might charge less for conservative model portfolios compared to those that are more aggressive (and in theory have more active management opportunities), or begin to unbundle their planning and investment management fees altogether, but the question of whether to charge differently for bonds and stocks within the same portfolio may soon be a moot point anyway!