Alternatives for Retail, shrinking to greatness & filming badly

Morning! This is a busy week. My eldest is off to uni (boo hoo and wahay all at the same time), lots of client time and it’s Citisoft EMEA’s Away Day. Time to get to know one’s colleagues better, share market intel and craft some grand new plans – exciting times!

All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy – Spike Milligan

But first, what’s going on? Well, alternatives are still riding high, especially if you’re rich. The FT rightly highlights “three much-trumpeted partnerships between gigantic traditional asset managers and well-known alternative investment firms”, namely Capital Group/KKR, BlackRock/Partners Group & State Street/Apollo. This is a move to gain market share in the lucrative wealth space, to consolidate true multi-asset solutions and secure those high fees. It’s going to be very interesting to see how these firms build the right solutions and keep those demanding clients happy. Not everyone’s a winner!

Schroders (and all other medium-sized firms) - shrinking to greatness?

There’s also a strong article about ‘How do you fix Schroders?’. I’ve always seen Schroders as a forward-looking market benchmark: global, multi-asset, not too big to fail, relatively early investor in data science and alternatives, a rising wealth business. And Peter Harrison is no shrinking violet. So, the fact that the August half-year results sent shares down to an 11-year low, just doesn’t seem fair. It might all be about costs. Adding, adding, adding is easy, but the best firms also take away and violently simplify. Btw, Richard Oldfield & Peter Hilborne , I have a few friends who could produce a Schroders digital twin and tell you exactly where to cut costs…!

We need storytelling. Otherwise, life just goes on and on like the number Pi. – Ang Lee

Last week, I did some filming with Simon Swords . I very much enjoyed it, but there is no correlation between my enjoyment and your potential future enjoyment. We had a nice little studio, comfy sofa, warming coffee. And then they stuck a massive microphone up my nose, a high definition camera magnifying all imperfections and a demand to ensure I spoke sense. Not very calming and reassuring. Unsurprisingly, one of us did actually use swear words and a client name in the same sentence, and supposedly talking with your head in your hands isn’t “good podcast material”. I can tell you what you can do with your pod. We’re definitely doing it again!

Oooh, I did some judging for Funds Europe which was excellent. Nick Fitzpatrick is a professional through and through and managed to herd the judging panel smoothly through 47 submissions in a matter of hours. It was a mind-opening breadth and depth of innovative, market-making and optimistic firms all vying for recognition. I always love seeing people trying to sell their value, sometimes in an ambulance-chasing manner admittedly, but I do love being surprised & impressed. I’m particularly interested to see legacy firms reinvent themselves with a new solution; probably the hardest thing to do and they deserve all the plaudits too.

Of course, I also had lunch with a good friend talking about successfully deploying AI (take note Derrick Hastie , I saw your PR with some cheeky other firm! You're a natural on film, I'll give you that...), talked private/public asset operations with a new COO at one of my favourite wealth clients and even managed to talk to Deutsche about their wealth business too. Keeping on, keeping on.

Have fun out there!

Audere est facere.