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M* Makes Bid To Offer Mutual Funds For Exclusive Use Of Advisers
You'll find my comments on the Investment News page. In short, M* has been selling advisers "managed portfolios" for years. They had been picking funds and allocations on paper, leaving it to the advisers to buy.
All this seems to be doing is taking that process in-house, where a M* fund hires the same managers, allocates the same sleeves, and then presents the prepackaged "managed portfolio" in a single fund to advisers.
Wouldn't this be a conflict of interest? They are ANALysing funds from other companies while providing their own funds. How about Gundlach starts rating their funds, Copper, Zinc and Tin?
That's not quite ANALogous, not unless Gundlach were to rate funds from over 150 companies, over 1000 funds in all, like M*. If all Gundlach did was comment on a competitor's funds, there would wouldn't be two competing interests to conflict. His sole interest would be in promoting his product at the expense of competitors.
But if he were to offer a broad rating service from which he profited, then the two lines of business would have a potential conflict. The interest of the ratings service would be in providing objective ratings. On the other hand, his funds would be interested in seeing the service make his funds look good relative to other families.
He could avoid that conflict by not rating his own funds. Then the service would not be making his funds look better (or worse) than the funds it rated.
Comments
All this seems to be doing is taking that process in-house, where a M* fund hires the same managers, allocates the same sleeves, and then presents the prepackaged "managed portfolio" in a single fund to advisers.
https://corporate.morningstar.com/us/documents/Brochures/Bifold-MIS-MF-TAMP200-0516.pdf
But if he were to offer a broad rating service from which he profited, then the two lines of business would have a potential conflict. The interest of the ratings service would be in providing objective ratings. On the other hand, his funds would be interested in seeing the service make his funds look good relative to other families.
He could avoid that conflict by not rating his own funds. Then the service would not be making his funds look better (or worse) than the funds it rated.
However, I wouldn't put it past Gundlach to start rating M* funds.