Tuesday, April 21, 2015

"Is Wall Street Robbing Pensions Blind?"

From Pension Pulse:
Dan Davies, a senior research adviser at Frontline Analysts, wrote a comment for The New Yorker, Is Wall Street Really Robbing New York City’s Pension Funds?:
Most any fee, even a fraction of one per cent, will come to look big if it’s multiplied by tens of billions of dollars. So when New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer wanted to make a point recently about the fees the city’s public-sector pension system had paid to asset managers between 2004 and 2014, he didn’t have to work very hard to find an outrageous number. Over the past ten years, New York City public employees have paid out two billion dollars in fees to managers of their “public market investments”—that is, their securities, mainly stocks and bonds. Gawker captured the implication as well as any media outlet with its headline: “Oh My God Wall Street Is Robbing Us Blind And We Are Letting Them

Stringer’s office was barely more restrained, sending out a press release that called the fees “shocking.” The comptroller also issued an analysis that spelled out the impact of fees on the investment returns of the five pension funds at issue: those of New York’s police and fire departments, city employees, teachers, and the Board of Education. Though the comptroller didn’t specify which firms had managed the funds, they were likely a familiar collection of financial-industry villains. “Heads or tails, Wall Street wins,” Stringer said.

The rhetoric tended to brush past the fact that the pension funds didn’t actually lose money. In the analysis, their performance was being measured relative to their benchmarks, essentially asking, for every different class of asset, whether the funds performed better or worse than a corresponding index fund would have. For reasons unclear, the city’s pension funds have been recording their performance without subtracting the fees paid to managers, but the math shows that New York City’s fund managers outperformed their benchmarks by $2.063 billion across the ten-year period under review, and charged $2.023 billion in management fees.

Compared with the average public pension fund’s experience on Wall Street, this is actually, frighteningly, pretty decent. All too often, when researchers investigate pension-fund performance, they find that management fees have eaten up more than any outperformance the managers have generated. A study published in 2013 by the Maryland Public Policy Institute concluded that the forty-six state funds it had surveyed could save a collective six billion dollars in fees each year by simply indexing their portfolios.

I covered the institutional-fund-management industry as an analyst for ten years, and was never given specific information on the pricing of individual deals, but I would estimate, based on the growth of the funds from 2004 to 2014, the variance in the market (especially the crash of 2008), and the total fees, that New York City paid, on average, about 0.2 per cent, or what a fund manager would call “twenty basis points.” You would expect the trustees of such a large portfolio to strike deals on fees, and indeed twenty basis points is much lower than the average paid to managers of most actively managed mutual funds (between seventy-four and eighty basis points, according to the Investment Companies Institute). It is still far more, though, than the five basis points charged by the Vanguard index tracker fund to large institutional investors....MUCH MORE
The New Yorker story was also highlighted by Alphaville's Further Reading linkmania post.