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Chartwell Funds to become part of Carillion Funds

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  • Former owners of Berwyn funds became owners of Chartwell funds in 2018, and now will become owners of Carillion Chartwell funds.
  • I was sure Chartwell sounded familiar. Finally found the thread. Chartwell grew its fund business by acquiring Berwyn funds in 2016. It appears that prior to that it had been offering only two funds itself, though it was managing portions of two Vanguard funds and providing other advisory services.

    https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/25497/the-berwyn-funds-reorganizing-to-be-part-of-chartwell-investment-partners

    In late 2016, Vanguad fired Chartwell. Vanguard accounted for 1/4 of its AUM.
    https://www.inquirer.com/philly/blogs/inq-phillydeals/Vanguard-fires-Chartwell-of-Berwyn-whose-owner-kills-deal-with-Philly-investor.html
  • Who does Vanguard hire to manage some of their equity or balanced fund assets other than Wellington? Anybody got a quick list/reference?
  • @shipwreckedandalone, too many! All VG active funds (33% of VG business) have outside advisors who may be supplemented by in-house quantitative group (like enhanced index). But Wellington Management is the biggest for VG.
  • edited December 2021
    I was hoping someone had a cheat sheet reference/link.

    Lets take a random example VEXRX. The fund owns individual securities derived from 5 advisors... 4 of them with different fundamental investment philosophies. So I assume Vanguard is getting presented with 4 different recommended portfolios of equities. How does Vanguard decide which stocks get included in the VEXRX portfolio and what % for each holding? What is the Vanguard process to choose or exclude all the stocks recommended by their advisors?
    I am not recommending VEXRX. I do not own VEXRX. I know nothing about VEXRX. No need to critique the fund.
  • edited December 2021

    Former owners of Berwyn funds became owners of Chartwell funds in 2018, and now will become owners of Carillion Chartwell funds.

    Wasn’t it vice versa?

    Chartwell bought Killen Asset Management, the owners of Berwyn Funds, and then proceeded to totally screw up BERIX. The old managers moved on to start PMEFX.
  • By owners, I meant holders. Sorry for the confusion.
  • MrRuffles said:

    Former owners of Berwyn funds became owners of Chartwell funds in 2018, and now will become owners of Carillion Chartwell funds.

    Wasn’t it vice versa?

    Chartwell bought Killen Asset Management, the owners of Berwyn Funds, and then proceeded to totally screw up BERIX. The old managers moved on to start PMEFX.


    And, one of the co-managers of the funds, Mark Saylor, recently left PMEFX. I remember BERIX quite fondly as a conservative balanced fund that didn't shoot out the lights but played a "steady Eddie" role in my portfolio.

    Sorry to see it get totally screwed up.

    Fred
  • Who does Vanguard hire to manage some of their equity or balanced fund assets other than Wellington? Anybody got a quick list/reference?

    Here's a list of Vanguard's active portfolio managers.
  • too many! All VG active funds (33% of VG business) have outside advisors

    Could you source this figure? Vanguard suggests a much lower percentage for its whole business. $1.6T/$7.2T = 22%.
    Few people realize we’re among the world’s largest active investment managers with more than $1.6 trillion entrusted to us by investors [as of 12/31/2020]
    https://institutional.vanguard.com/VGApp/iip/site/institutional/investments/AlphaActive
    About $7.2 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 31, 2021
    https://about.vanguard.com/who-we-are/fast-facts/

    It's possible that Vanguard is presenting only domestic actively managed AUM and that the global figure (and thus overall percentage) is higher.

    M* looked more narrowly at just US equity funds, where the fraction of assets that are actively managed is even lower (1/8):
    Counting both their mutual fund and exchange-traded fund versions, Vanguard’s U.S. stock index funds amount to a collective $2.2 trillion--7 times the total for the active funds [as of mid 2020].
    https://www.morningstar.com/articles/994649/whither-vanguards-active-us-equity-funds

    Regarding active fixed income funds (including MMFs) Wellington is the sole advisor for VFIIX / VFIJX and VWEHX / VWEAX. The Vanguard Fixed Income Group manages all the other active Vanguard fixed income funds (including MMFs) alone, except for VWESX / VWETX where Wellington helps out.

    Aside from Vanguard's fixed income funds and funds of funds, there are a number of other active funds that Vanguard manages alone. The more vanilla of them are VMVFX / VMNVX, VFMFX, VSEQX, and VSTCX. Alternative strategy funds include VASFX and VMNFX. Vanguard's commodities fund VCMDX is run jointly by its quant group and its fixed income group.
  • edited December 2021
    @msf, that 22% passive seems correct now. I just used my memory that a few years ago, the split was 2/3 rd passive, 1/3 rd active. But there has been a huge expansion on the index side, including the ETFs. I don't know how VG characterizes its factor ETFs but that isn't a big amount yet.
  • Thank you Observant1.
    I want to check to see how many advisors offer mutual funds to the masses and their metrics/performance.
    Waiting to see were Saylor lands if he stays in the business and his new teams risk/return objectives. May be a better option.
  • @yogibearbull - Thanks for the update. You're right of course that most of the money has been flowing into index funds.

    It has gotten much harder for active funds to compete with index funds. That's especially true in the larger cap space where one finds most Vanguard funds. So the continuing shift into index funds at Vanguard is understandable, despite the low cost of its actively managed funds.
  • Vanguard has benefitted from two big trends: indexing and target-date funds.
    Vanguard had $357B of inflows year to date through November.
    This was more than the total of $353B for iShares, Fidelity, and State Street combined.
  • For context, the source of the figures is Morningstar. See, e.g.
    https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1072421/existing-trends-in-us-fund-flows-hold-in-november

    As Vanguard's total AUM of $7.2B is significantly more than the total AUM of iShares, Fidelity, and State Street combined ($6.0B), it's not unexpected that Vanguard would draw more money. From these summary figures, it seems as though Vanguard's rate of growth is slower than that of the others'.

    It would be interesting to know how much in assets are held in passive investments at each company and how they compare in attracting more passive money. For example, the fourth largest firm in terms of AUM is American Funds. (State Street is just half its size.) But American Funds had no passive money flows last month. Which is completely unsurprising - it offers no passive funds.

    In November, iShares alone was close to Vanguard in the amount of passive money it drew ($27B vs $31B). Fidelity was far behind even though it is of comparable size to iShares. Again not surprising, since Fidelity offers a wide variety of actively managed funds.

    OTOH, Fidelity may be doing well in head-to-head matchups: Fidelity's S&P 500 fund FXAIX outdrew Vanguard's VFINX in October¹. Though they were both well behind iShares Core S&P 500 IVV and State Street's SPY. That might have more to do with the sales channel (ETF vs. OEF) than with the funds or families themselves.

    ¹ Source is M*'s full fund flows report; when one requests a download, one gets the October report.
  • What is going on here? The topic of this thread is "Chartwell Funds to become part of Carillion Funds".

    Some of you are obviously hijacking this thread to discuss a totally irrelevant topic. Please show some courtesy towards the OP and start your own thread if you want continue in the same vein.

    Fred
  • edited December 2021
    No problem or offense taken. While Vanguard utilized Chartwell at one time, Chartwell funds has been sold possibly for monetary and marketing reasons. Chartwell acquired Berwyn which was a growing advisory firm until it was sold. The discussion has shown how an actively managed fund advisory has sold out to a firm for possibly monetary and marketing reasons.

    Hancock Whitney Corp. is a BHC which sold its mutual funds earlier this year. Chartwell Funds was a subsidiary of TriState Capital Holdings, Inc, a BHC in PA.
  • msf
    edited December 2021
    Hard to tell if Carillon Tower has anything strategic in mind. It acquired Scout Funds (including its subsidiary Reams) in 2017 and left the management in place. But it used those funds as acquiring funds to merge two non-Scout funds into oblivion. I haven't yet checked on the health/size of existing Carillon-owned funds.

    Carillon acquisition of Scout:
    https://www.carillontower.com/our-thinking/scout-reams-acquisition
    https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2017/05/briefly-noted-9/

    From the latter: "Carillon wasn’t particularly transparent and the guy representing Scout was curt to the point of being rude."

    Carillon subsequent "disappearing" of funds:
    https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/40819/carillon-series-trust-reorganizes-two-funds
    https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/2018/01/briefly-noted-17/

    In the latter, Prof Snowball characterizes these moves and more as "housecleaning". Part of that was to liquidate one of the Scout/Reams acquired funds, then called Carillon Reams Low Duration Bond Fund.

    The current suite of Carillon funds:
    https://www.carillontower.com/our-funds/fund-strategies
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