There are two overarching problems facing investors as they engage with the financial services industry as it exists today:

The first is that the industry wants you to believe that investing is more complicated than it really is. If only you turn over your hard-earned dollars to the experts, their star portfolio manager will beat the market and help you reach your goals faster. Academics that have actually studied the data will tell you that the notion of an active investment approach being superior to a passive strategy is nonsense. For more about Fair Asset Management’s investment philosophy, please click here.

Secondly, the financial services industry spends billions of marketing dollars every year encouraging investors to give them a portion of their returns. The vast economies of scale that come hand in hand with the management of other people’s money have done far more to enrich fund companies & financial advisors via asset-based management fees than to benefit investors. To quote David Swensen, former CIO of Yale University’s endowment fund:

“Even in instances where net returns to investors fail to reach the returns available on cash, the manager profits handsomely.”

With the assets under management or “AUM” business model, fund companies & financial advisors are incentivized to gather assets, which inevitably leads to conflicts of interest. At Fair Asset Management, we operate on a flat annual retainer fee. To learn more about our fee structure please click here.