31–35 of 35 posts
> the 49-year-old Given the prevalence 'youth worship' articles on here lately it is good to point his age out to people. Get out there and make an impact regardless of your age or situation.
Like you I immediately thought of the recent ageism articles on HN and specifically PG's comment about the "cut off" age for consideration for tech-investors being 32.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like you I immediately thought of the recent ageism articles on HN and specifically PG's comment about the "cut off" age for consideration for tech-investors being 32.
Link to the said comment please. I'm unable to find it.
That article has four links to other articles but not a link to the company it is profiling. I hate when they do that. https://www.feex.com/
This is a growing anti-web trend -- the tendency of web properties to only self-link. I assume someone somewhere has actual metrics justifying this, but it's the antithesis of what the web is about, but it's exactly why the only links in this article are to other Bloomberg Business Week articles.
Awesome idea. The fees on 401Ks are awful. My company has fees on index funds 4 times the competition. When I asked why, I was told, "Because that's the only way we can make money." Umm...... Fidelity does fine with 1/4 the fees, so does Vanguard.
This could be a scale effect. Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run, so if your company only has 1/4 the assets under management then their comment might be true.
It is, but not an overly expensive one. I worked for a couple of years in an asset management operation where we managed a variety of funds, all with different risk-return mixes. The smallest fund was a few hundred thousand pounds, the largest around three billion. Total assets under management were about five billion pounds, the most complex of which was a pension fund.
Front office consisted myself (the most junior member of the front office) plus 4 others, including the chief investment manager. Middle office consisted one person who was also the back office manager, and back office, including the department secretary, was four people.
Total department budget was less than a million per year - including office rent, taxes, information services (Bloomberg, Datastream, etc) yet we substantially outperformed (usually within one standard deviation, occasionally outside) performance and risk budgets, as they were defined to us by trustees. And we worked eight hour days, a rarity in the City at any institution.
In hindsight, what we did was quite simple - invest in what we thought was wise, and not worry too much. Much mainstream investment management seems to be embodiment-in-large of the Peter Principal: create work in order to seem busy / important. The upside of the Peter Principal is to collect large bonuses by virtue of seeming important, of which none of us did, as it was simply a job - look after the organisation's funds and the pensioners' pensions. This organisation was somewhat unique in both mandate and people attracted to it.
tl;dr Fund management costs, for a collection of a pretty good performing funds, was 0.02%. This excludes broker fees and management fees of indirectly invested funds.
Byline: I am of course aware that having a single middle office manager is far from ideal, and that the middle office manager managing the back office is bad from an operational control perspective. This was changed after I left.
Awesome idea. The fees on 401Ks are awful. My company has fees on index funds 4 times the competition. When I asked why, I was told, "Because that's the only way we can make money." Umm...... Fidelity does fine with 1/4 the fees, so does Vanguard.
This could be a scale effect. Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run, so if your company only has 1/4 the assets under management then their comment might be true.