Sometimes we get enough good responses to a note from pack-members that we think it’s worth publishing them on their own. Our readers had some especially useful thoughts on our note about principal-agent problems and the meme of alignment! in the hiring of advisers, consultants and fund managers.

Thank you! This is one of the things that I have been trying to explain to clients and regulators ever since the Department of Labor released its Fiduciary Standard. There is no such thing as conflict free humans. There is no ideal compensation method. Every one of them has a conflict. Commissions are evil? Taken to excess, sure, but if you are a buy and hold investor it can be the cheapest way to pay for occasional advice. Advisory fees are perfect? Why does the SEC have a bulletin on reverse churning? (Charging Advisory fees, but not trading frequently enough to make the advisory fee cheaper than a commission model.) Advice only model? Who will help me execute the advice? I get a blueprint, but how do I pick a contractor to make it real?

Don’t even get me started on updating the regulations. Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, and numerous others were fiduciaries for their investors. It did nothing to protect the investors. Governmental regulations are like a warranty. A warranty may force the manufacturer to repair their product, but it won’t prevent the hassle and other costs associated with a failure in the product. A strong warranty does not make up for a poor quality product. I would rather have a high quality product with no warranty. (Also, any car dealer will tell you that warranty repairs are the ultimate in misaligned incentives.) Technology will take an extremely long time to replace human interaction. (if it ever does.) No one cares about hurting a computer or robot’s “feelings.” We feel beholden to other people. How do I know? Look at physical fitness. How many people have lost weight, improved their diet and turned their life around because they bought a Fitbit or Apple Watch? How many have done it with a personal trainer and/or nutritionist? Investment analysis, portfolio design, portfolio management, financial planning, tax analysis, budgeting, really all of the math components of financial success will be automated. I’m sure there will be several different competing tools. None of them will take the place of a caring human financial advisor that will encourage you to use the tools, understand the differences between them, and provide personalized interpretation (wisdom) on using them to maximum advantage. I don’t work with institutions, I work with people. People want a caring guide to show them the ropes, identify the traps, and generally help them do better than they could do on their own. My clients are part of my packs. I use this part of my pack to help me do a better job for that part.

Pack Member TheCoeus

We believe in advice, too, a belief we have brought up a few times whenever the “everything in finance will be automated” crowd shows up after Vanguard or Blackrock enters a new segment.

Like TheCoeus, I am not, however, a believer in the Fiduciary Rule. I’m also not a believer in the application of the standard duties of care, loyalty, etc. to corporate and other board structures. Not because I don’t think that there are such duties we owe. Of course we do. But because “prudent man” standards are precisely what give us layers of consultants and bankers and lawyers to ensure that executives, boards, pension management teams, service providers and others have done enough to offload accountability for the decisions they’ve made. That is the problem with any good idea made into a meme, like alignment!: it auto-tunes our behavior to satisfy the parameters of the meme instead of embracing the underlying concept with a full heart.

The thing many fee-based clients don’t understand is this: they are subsidizing commission-based clients. My commission clients (usually older, buy-and-hold, low maintenance people) don’t do nearly enough trading to justify charging them a fee. But they still get phone calls, meetings, Christmas cards, and all the services they need. But maybe they make one or two trades a year. Without the fee-based people essentially paying the bills these commission clients would be passed off to someone else or sent online. And they don’t want that. A lot of them have been with my family for decades. We have relationships. So they get everything they need and it costs them very little. It’s a great deal for them.

Pack Member Desperate_Yuppie

A similar observation with some practical implications of it.

Because our industry (often very rightfully) obsessed with process, we like to think that cutting off the possibility of the appearance of not having our clients’ interests at heart by eliminating structures with the potential for abuse is the right choice, somehow better than building a practice around values that requires effort and discipline to achieve without error.

I’m with Desperate_Yuppie here (Ed Note: Some of y’all’s handles…). Putting alignment over alignment! can accommodate a wide variety of fee structures.

Hi Rusty. Re your recommendations, how do you suggest calculating the beta hurdle, adjusted for long/short exposures?

Pack Member Bruce Winson

I have a few thoughts on principles here, but above all: simplicity.

I don’t think it’s every worth getting caught up in trying to create a hurdle from anything that starts to look like risk model beta, whether that’s holdings-based (e.g. Barra, etc.) or multi-factor regression based on historical returns. It is a recipe for an irreconcilable argument with your manager. Every time.

If you are dealing with a delta-1 long/short equity or credit manager, by which I mean one which almost always expresses exposure through vanilla long and short positions and only rarely options, I think you are best served by suggesting a hurdle based on 3-to-5 year average net exposure. Once you start getting into documentation of more complicated calculations or beta adjustments to that net exposure, the execution/completion risk becomes overwhelming. Don’t get cute and include an ongoing update to the calculation. Find the number. Hard code it in the document. Monitor it and re-open the issue if it’s no longer appropriate. I’ve been successful getting this kind of hurdle.

Once you start getting into more complicated strategies that have long effective net exposure but incorporate asymmetric securities to get it, you can either get in the game of incorporating delta measures into your hurdle (woof!) or basing the hurdle on a single factor returns-based beta/slope calculation against the major beta benchmark (also woof, but less so). I’ve successfully negotiated the latter. Never the former.

If you’re dealing with managers who maintain that they have no beta bias – especially in global macro, managed futures, and market neutral strategies – good luck. I’ve had zero luck getting any of these funds to agree to any kind of hurdle like this. T-Bills or LIBOR-Plus hurdles, sure, but not any net exposure-based, returns-based, or other approach to calculating long-term beta biases.

No, not even when you show that their macro fund’s returns are just a steaming pile of negative alpha wrapped around mostly static rates beta and random rotation through different carry trades.

This a really important post. My experience as a manager has been that even the best efforts never get us to complete alignment and, as Rusty suggests, we need to accept this. I used to think the gold standard in alignment was for managers to have a large % of their net wealth invested in their own funds. I still think this helps, but following Rusty’s logic, it’s no more than that. What I came to realize as a manager with something like 80%+ of my wealth in my own fund was that my risk preference at certain times was likely to very different from my clients where our fund was one piece of a much larger portfolio. This really hit home in 2009/2010 after we had navigated the GFC with only a modest single digit drawdown which we recovered over the next 18 months. We could have recovered more but remained in somewhat of a defensive crouch with lower levels of leverage than pre-GFC. A client said he was disappointed in our results – we should have more aggressively re-levered post the crisis. At the time I honestly felt he was a bit crazy – wasn’t the crisis driven by excess leverage? But with time I’ve realized that part of it was a difference in our risk preferences. As managers with the vast majority of our wealth in the fund we were nervous about re-levering, even if we didn’t explicitly recognize this. As an outside investor, with distance and other investments they felt this was time to be greedy when everyone was else was scared. We ended up not being aligned at that moment and I think a big part of it was that having so much invested in the made if very difficult to asses the risk-taking environment objectively.

Pack Member Kevin Coldiron

I really hope people take the time to read what Kevin has to say here. He has run hundreds of millions in long/short and market neutral quant strategies really successfully, honestly and transparently, and his thoughts here are the thoughts that have been shared with me by many others many times. (Full disclosure: he was someone I was happily invested with in a prior asset owner’s seat.)

There’s a sub-meme within alignment! of skin-in-the-game! that is similarly based on very sound principles, and which gets quantized into a cartoon version of itself. I don’t have a problem with wanting managers to eat their own cooking – and I absolutely understand the underlying impulse behind the request. Still, as with all the other activities we mention in the piece itself, we must recognize something important about alignment and incentives. If something puts us in the same boat as someone else, but changes what that boat is to something the other person didn’t really want or need, we have not created alignment.