It’s a battle for the world’s best-performing third-party asset management brands, according to the latest edition of Broadridge's Fund Brand 50.
Findings released Tuesday by Broadridge show that Vanguard seized the top spot, dethroning BlackRock to second place, while Capital Group stayed steady in third place.
The independent study measures and ranks asset managers' relative brand attractiveness based on fund selector perceptions, taking into account 10 brand attributes, to identify the top U.S. and global brands.
Chuck Failla, CEO and founder of Sovereign Financial Group, says at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if there’s a No. 1 fund family because they’re all worthy candidates for being at the top.
“Definitely Vanguard should be toward the top,” he says. “Should they be at the top-top? I don't know that they should be because I'm not sure how you would define an entire fund family.”
His two cents are that it comes down to “either you're a good fund family, or you're not a good fund family.”
“I think Vanguard is a great fund family,” Failla added. “I also think BlackRock is a great fund family. Just because they're a top fund family doesn't mean every single one of their funds is one that I would recommend to clients ... But do they deserve to be ranked a top as opposed to the top? Absolutely.”
Joe Petry, financial planner and founder of Mayfair Financial, argued that Vanguard deserves the top spot.
“What is moving dollars between fund managers is cost,” he wrote in an email. “Jack Bogle was the Pied Piper for low-cost, diversified funds long before others grudgingly joined the fray. BlackRock and the others also have very competitive offerings but try to differentiate themselves in other ways besides cost, such as factor investing or alternatives.”
As for the top two asset management brands, in the end, there’s nothing that really separates Vanguard from BlackRock, Failla said.
“They're both easy to work with. They're both very professional companies that have their services teams dialed in very well, and if you're using ETFs, as we generally like to use mainly ETFs, you just buy them,” Failla said. “There's nothing to it. You just plug it in and you just purchase them on the open market. So there's not a whole lot of interaction.”
That said, Vanguard is one of the lower-cost actively managed shops, which is probably why it's popular, Failla said, but he notes that more and more advisors are leaning more toward financial planning and asset allocation, as opposed to stock selection.
One asset management brand that Failla suggested advisors could be missing is State Street, which came up with SPY, “the grandfather of all low-cost ETFs,” he noted. “They're coming up with a whole new suite of uber low-cost ETFs that I think will rival Vanguard and the iShares, so let's not sleep on them, because I think they've got some pretty good offerings in the pipeline, and also at market right now.”
The reason investors should be considering SPY, Failla says, is because a lot of institutional traders will use it. Failla noted that Sovereign sometimes uses it as well.
“[Especially] if we're doing option strategies around it, because the option market on SPY is better than the other S&P 500 ETFs,” he says. “But that said, SPY certainly knows that there are some reasons that you could have a much lower-cost S&P 500 ETF if you don't need the option, hedging capabilities so they launched these other ones, like SPLG.”
State Street’s SPY currently sits at 9.5 basis points, which is still “super-duper low,” Failla says. “There's a lot of really interesting things happening in the decompression, because it is just a commodity.”
One other noteworthy asset management brand found its way in the top 10: First Trust, which is known for doing “a lot of thematic ETFs,” Failla says. “We happen to use their dividend play, which we think is a pretty good one, but they just have so many offerings out there.”
He added that First Trust does one of the best jobs in the industry when it comes to reaching out to and educating advisors.
“They do a ton of those types of educational events,” Failla said. “They are very active in getting in front of advisors, and they also have a lot of different options so I can see why they're moving up on the on the rankings for that reason.”
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