Monday, October 18, 2021

"Even Harry and Meghan Are Joining the Build-Your-Own Index Craze" (and Shatner corrects the young Duke's big bro)

Oh Dear God.

First up, from Advisor Perspectives:

They may not realize it, but the Sussexes just joined one of the hottest trends on Wall Street.

The freshly minted “impact partners” in the more than $1 billion asset manager Ethic are the latest members of the bespoke indexing movement that’s reshaping the U.S. investment industry. The fintech firm, in which Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are investors, builds custom indexes to ride the boom in environmental, social, and governance investing.

As new technology and cheaper trading proliferate, money managers are betting the next big thing is offering clients the benefits of indexing -- like cheap trading costs and diversification -- tailored to specific tastes.

In the past few weeks alone, Franklin Resources Inc. bought $6.4 billion money manager O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, including the firm’s custom-indexing business known as Canvas, while quant giant Dimensional Fund Advisors slashed the minimum for its separately managed accounts, or SMAs.

That all followed Vanguard’s purchase of direct indexer Just Invest in July -- the asset giant’s first-ever acquisition.

“The technology behind direct indexing is making the investment minimums and costs of running these accounts fall like a rock,” said James Seyffart, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

Morgan Stanley spent $7 billion on Eaton Vance Corp. last year, which owned Parametric Portfolio Associates -- one of the heavyweights in direct indexing. BlackRock Inc.’s $1 billion purchase of Aperio, a creator of tailored index strategies, quickly followed....

....MUCH MORE

We are considering changing our focus and going Royals 24/7.  Two from Spacexmania: 

Prince William blasts Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk after William Shatner ‘space tourism’ saying ‘fix the planet first

And: 

William Shatner Says Duke of Cambridge Has ‘Got the Wrong Idea’ About his Space Flight

....Following Prince William’s comments about issues around current space flights, William Shatner responded to the royal’s concerns. The actor both justified his trip as well as to shut down what the Duke of Cambridge had to say.

“He’s a lovely, gentle, educated Englishman, but he’s got the wrong idea,” Shatner told Entertainment Tonight.

The star explained what he meant by noting that the “idea here is not to go, ‘Yeah, look at me. I’m in space.'” Instead, he said that “the prince is missing the point. The point is these are the baby steps to show people [that] it’s very practical. You can send somebody like me up into space.”

“We’ve got all the technology, the rockets, to send the things up there… You can build a base 250, 280 miles above the Earth and send that power down here, and they catch it, and they then use it, and it’s there. All it needs is… somebody as rich as Jeff Bezos [to say], ‘Let’s go up there.'”

Going a little deeper to explain that “the idea of getting industry up there” is “so that all those polluting industries, especially, for example, the industries that make electricity” end up “off of Earth.”

Although Shatner did agree with the royal when it comes to the fact that we should be putting work in on our own planet, he said, “So fix some of the stuff down here … But we can curl your hair and put lotion on your face at the same time.”....

....MUCH MORE