Tag: ETFs

Transcript: Tom Rampulla

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://ritholtz.com/2022/10/transcript-tom-rampulla/

Excerpt:

BARRY RITHOLTZ, HOST, MASTERS IN BUSINESS: This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest, Tom Rampulla has been with the Vanguard Group since 1988. He has worked with every CEO, starting with Jack Bogle, all the way up to the current CEO Tim Buckley, and has essentially helped to establish the Financial Advisors Group, essentially the group at Vanguard that works with RIAs and broker dealers and other financial professionals who provide portfolios, advice, financial plans to the investing public.

He has a unique perch from with which to view the financial services industry, both from within Vanguard as well as looking out over the financial landscape and seeing what’s going on with such trends as mutual funds, ETFs, direct indexing, the rise of passive, the rise not just of Vanguard, but the dominance of Vanguard, and the associated Vanguard effect, the pressure on fees that have helped make investing so affordable. We discussed all these things as well as why there has never been a better time to be a retail investor than right now, right here in this era. I found the conversation to be absolutely fascinating, and I think you will also.

So with no further ado, my conversation with the Vanguard Group’s Tom Rampulla.

I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this week is Tom Rampulla. He is the managing director of Vanguard’s Financial Advisor Services Division, where he began back in 2002. That group provides investment services, education and research to more than a thousand financial advisory firms, representing more than $3 trillion in assets. Tom joined Vanguard back in 1988. Tom Rampulla, welcome to Bloomberg.

THOMAS RAMPULLA, MANAGING DIRECTOR, FINANCIAL ADVISOR SERVICES DIVISION, VANGUARD: Thanks, Barry. It’s great to be here.

……

RAMPULLA: You talk to them off the ledge. My clients, the advisors are really earning their fees right now, and providing a tremendous amount of value. So there’s a lot of phone volume, a lot of digital volume, so we’re very, very, very busy. And you know, it’s all about calming people down, we’ll get through this, you look at the long term. Things tend to work out. We — you know, our investing philosophy is, first of all, get an objective, put a plan together, make sure it’s a low cost plan.

And the other thing is be disciplined, right. Stick to your plan, just get rid of the noise. This is big noise. This isn’t just some little blip. This is big noise, but you know, get rid of noise and be disciplined. Most times that’s around rebalancing. This time, stocks and bonds are both going down, so you’re not rebalancing so much. But you know, March of 2020 was a great opportunity to rebalance and add some value. So it’s really sticking to that long-term approach and that discipline is what we really recommend.

Publication Date: 18 Oct 2022

Publication Site: Barry Ritholtz

BlackRock Tweaked Some Models. It Triggered a Wave of Buying and Selling.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackrock-tweaked-some-models-it-triggered-a-wave-of-buying-and-selling-11625857596?mod=itp_wsj&ru=yahoo

Excerpt:

In late May, an obscure BlackRock Inc. commodities fund took in more than $1 billion in new money in less than a week.

The iShares GSCI Commodity Dynamic Roll Strategy exchange-traded fund was a relatively small fund in BlackRock’s larger suite of funds. But on the week of May 26, the ETF—which trades under the ticker COMT and tracks futures contracts tied to commodities from energy to metals to agriculture—scored its biggest one-day influx of new cash on record, according to FactSet data.

The surge helped the ETF more than double its assets under management to more than $2 billion.

The answer for why so much money flowed into the fund wasn’t solely because Wall Street traders were up in arms with inflation fears that were helping to drive idle funds into commodity investments. According to BlackRock documents and people familiar with the matter, BlackRock had sent instructions to brokerages and other financial platforms to alter a series of “model portfolios” to include this fund.

Model portfolios are ready-made fund combos delivered through financial advisers and brokerages to everyday investors. Brokerages can design their own model portfolios, or rely on guidance from fund companies like BlackRock. The May surge in the BlackRock fund shows just how powerful that guidance can be.

Author(s): Dawn Lim

Publication Date: 9 July 2021

Publication Site: WSJ