![]() “Pay-to-play shelf-space agreements” are one way that RIA custodians offer No-Transaction-Fee (NTF) funds, which effectively embed trading costs within the mutual funds themselves (with little way for advisors or their clients to identify what the exact breakdown of what those 12b-1 and sub-TA costs may be). In this guest post, Yang Xu – CEO of TradingFront which competes for RIA custody services in partnership with Interactive Brokers – explores how the RIA custodian business model continues to evolve, why the recent onset of zero-commission trading has merely shifted how (but usually not whether) clients are paying for trading, and how advisors can do their due diligence to understand the real investment costs that clients may face (and revenue sources that RIA custodians still generate) through the platforms that RIAs purportedly use for “free” (as in the end, “free” rarely ever is). ![]() ![]() In the decades since, the nature of RIA platforms has evolved tremendously, from advisors phoning in trades to an entire ecosystem of RIA custodians providing trading, billing, and supporting technology for RIAs to use… but still all predicated on a model where the brokerage-firm-as-RIA-custodian profits from advisors at the expense of their clients. In the early days of the Registered Investment Adviser (RIA), financial advisors who didn’t affiliate with a broker-dealer had no way to actually manage investment accounts on behalf of their clients… short of having clients open “retail” investment accounts with direct-to-consumer “retail” brokerage platforms, and grant their advisor a limited power of attorney to call in (pre-internet!) and place trades on their behalf, which was a win for the client (who had their portfolio managed), the advisor (who had a platform to manage their client portfolios), and the brokerage firm itself (that generated trading commissions every time an advisor traded on behalf of their clients).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |