This content is from: Portfolio
Fees Are Out of Control, Returns Are Not
Finance professionals get paid more than any other profession on the planet. Do they deserve it?

As Institutional Investor pointed out in its story on ARs Rich List, published last week, hedge fund managers became, and remained, billionaires during the hardest period to make money on Wall Street in several generations from 2001 through 2011 when the Dow Industrials rose a total of just 13 percent, the Nasdaq Composite climbed a mere 7 percent and the Standard & Poors 500 lost nearly 5 percent. And, in three of the 11 years, the average hedge fund lost money.
Forbes agrees, describing the 36 people whove become Billionaires from the hedge fund industry:
The past year was an interesting one for this elite group. For starters, 2011 was officially the second worst year in the history of the industry, thanks to largely unforeseen levels of volatility in the commodity, equity and European debt markets that interrupted the international economic recovery. As a result, the average hedge fund was down approximately 5% last year. However, challenging markets didnt stop the top three highest-earning hedge fund managers of 2011 from taking home billion-dollar paychecks. Fees. Are. Out. Of. Control. You: Nobodys forcing pensions or sovereigns to buy these services. This is a free market. Me: Bullocks. The politicians tell pensions to earn unrealistic returns and then give them no choice, due to insufficient resourcing, but to look to Wall Street for help. In other words, the only reason finance professionals get to charge the fees they charge is because the people that preside over institutional investors generally have no clue that if they paid their staff one tenth of what theyre paying Wall Street, they could replicate upwards of 80 percent of what theyre paying Wall Street to do. You: Stop being so naïve. Public pension funds could never hire the sort of talent that resides on Wall Street. Me: Bullocks. Many funds already do; Ontario Teachers has been doing it for three decades with an IRR of 10 percent! And if public pensions started paying anywhere near market wages, Id wager theyd get the talent they require too. Me Again: To the Masters of the Universe, Heres the truth: You make seven, eight, and, yes, nine figure salaries not because youre so much smarter than everybody else on the planet. You make that much because the people who sponsor your clients (the institutional investors) dont realize that a lot of what you do isnt that hard. You: Lies! Me: Do you like apples? You do? Well, a friend of mine who runs a large public pension fund is saving, right now, over 100 million dollars per year by in-sourcing all fixed income strategies (while still meeting benchmarks). How? The in-house portfolios are managed at ~2 bps, while the external portfolio was being farmed out at 40bps. Boom. $100 million. How do ya like them apples? You: Ummm. Me: You know whats actually funny about all of this? Well, not ha ha! funny...more like say what funny. The reason most politicians fall into this trap stems from the fact that most dont connect the fees paid to external service providers with the costs paid to internal teams. Most funds have their budgets for external fees and internal salary and headcount separated. In fact, Id say 90-95 percent of the budgets of these organizations dont go through formal appropriation simply because they are in the form of external fees. As a consequence, the holders of the purse strings focus all their attention on 5% of the costs (salaries). They dont understand literally that sending $200 million off to Wall Street could be avoided by spending $20 million on local talent...oftentimes with the same result.This is the dirty secret of funds management: The finance professionals get paid more than any other profession on the planet because the politicians and Boards refuse to properly resource their own funds (all the while asking them to make unrealistic returns). And this lack of resourcing (and overly aggressive return targets) gives the finance professionals asymmetric bargaining powers. And, as you might expect, they use it.
And this is why more funds will look to move assets in house. Not because they think they can do things better than Wall Street. But because they think they can do the same thing...at a tenth the price. And with the right commitment by policymakers, I think they might be right.