SeekInvest Academy

Proxy Plumbing and Controls In a blog post on Principal-Agent conflicts of interest, I supported a proposal put forward by Caleb Griffiths regarding empowering individual index fund investors to influence the proxy voting process as a means for resolving this conflict.  Now it seems that Senators Toomey and Johnson agree.  Senator Baldwin and Congresswoman Jayapol […]

Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) Money is flowing into companies and funds that cloak themselves in a sustainability mantle. Anyone looking for capital might be incentivized to align themselves with this hot trend, which means how firms and funds talk about their sustainability activities and how they measure impact is very important.  Transparent, measurable, comparable […]

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the principal-agent conflict, as defined in the agency theory, has further increased due to the rise of passive management. To manage these increasing conflicts, individual index fund investors need to be empowered and enabled to influence the proxy voting process.

Index fund managers have an outsized influence on proxy voting, which gives them incredible market power.

Judging Best Interests Can the largest investment managers truly judge what is in the true shareholders’ best interests? The ExxonMobil vote demonstrated the power that the passive managers have over the companies they own.  Without the passive managers coming off the bench to vote for new directors, Engine No. 1 had no real hope of […]

Voting as a shareholder, or proxy voting, is not like voting as a citizen. The structure of index funds separates the shareholder’s decision-making authority from the companies that they own, i.e., the fund’s investors do not have the opportunity to influence or vote on their shares. The three largest index managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State […]

I have been thinking recently about how best to pay for financial advice. Based on a high-level analysis of the options available, you may end up paying an additional $35,000 over a 10 year period depending on the option chosen. Even to someone who has $1M to invest, an additional $35,000 can make a difference. […]

A solution without a clearly defined problem The Model Marketplace — A Brief History Back in August 2017, while working for Morningstar, I wrote about Model Marketplaces and how they would be the next big thing in wealth management. Soon after Morningstar released a version of a Model Marketplace integrated with the Office portfolio accounting platform and […]

At this years Morningstar Investor Conference our CEO, Kunal Kapoor, announced Morningstar’s plan to launch a Model Marketplace in 2018. Since then we have been doing some work to define exactly what this means for Morningstar, for StrategistsAsset Managers and for Advisors. What is a Model Marketplace? In a recent blog post by Michael Kitces […]

The cost of healthcare in retirement has doubled since 2000 and is expected to continue to rise. When you look at when money is spent on healthcare in retirement vs. living expenses, an interesting trend appears. Typically, retirees spend more on discretionary expenses in their early years of retirement. The opposite is true for health […]