Eaton Vance’s Tom Faust Wants to Save Active Management

汤姆·芬德已经有足够的积极管理人员战争。The CEO of Boston’s Eaton Vance, a 91-year-old publicly traded investment management company with $303 billion in assets, is arming his stock and bond pickers with a tool he believes will level the playing field and slow the encroachment of passive strategies into his industry. Eaton Vance is rolling out a new exchange-traded fund designed specifically for active managers by eliminating the need to continually broadcast their best ideas to the market.

但是浮士电没有停下来。他正在授权他公司的专利ETF，叫做NextShares，向他的竞争对手提供，希望共同基金公司的集体力量将使产品成为下一个大事，并将积极管理人员免于灭绝。浮士德，他的家人在Tiny Helena，Arkansas跑了一个锯木厂，并于1976年首次登上了一架飞机，他在Massachusetts理工学院学习机械工程和经济学的途中，相信Nextscares将降低到积极经理的成本降低成本赢得吸引他们赞成廉价指数基金的投资者。预计NextShares预计每年将有效股权相互资金相同，每年平均管理60到80个基点。

“For the first time, active strategies will be available in a structure that avoids those inefficiencies of a mutual fund that have dragged down active management,” says Faust, 56, who saw firsthand the ravages that the decline of the industry and farm economy took on his hometown. “This is about better performance for investors, and from a business standpoint, it puts active managers in a position to be more competitive and slow down the rate of conversion of the fund business from active to passive.”

The CEO, who joined Eaton Vance in 1985 as a natural resources analyst, is betting that innovation will help power his firm’s revenue and profit growth. Though Eaton Vance reached a high in assets under management in 2014 and had record revenues and earnings, fund companies that use original research to try to beat the market are under pressure. Last year investors favored passive strategies over active ones in every U.S. equity category as well as some bond strategies. ETFs have added fuel to the index trend as firms race to offer a new twist on the hot-selling, low-cost products and as advisers add them to model portfolios.

As an engineer who has spent most of his career in money management, Faust has long loved applying his training to new products and acquisitions. He and the previous CEO, James Hawkes, spent the late 1990s and early 2000s diversifying the company beyond its conservative roots managing money for wealthy investors. In 2003 they acquired Parametric Portfolio Associates, which provides low-fee investor services like tax and risk management. Faust saw a company that would help Eaton Vance diversify away from traditional active management, have an offering at a different price point and expand into the institutional market, a small part of its business at the time. Parametric has grown its earnings and assets 40 percent annually.

Eaton Vance also became the largest raiser of new closed-end fund assets from 2003 to 2007. But during the financial crisis, the funds traded at big discounts to the value of their underlying holdings as buyers disappeared and the market for auction-rate preferred shares dried up, ending their financing source. The closed-end funds market never recovered. Faust needed a new source of growth.

Faust, who became CEO in 2007, was initially attracted to ETFs for prosaic reasons — they could be used to lower investors’ tax bills. It was a strategy that fit well with the firm’s lineup of tax-managed equity funds. Faust quickly came to realize, though, that ETFs offered far more, such as reduced trading and transfer agency costs, which can be a big part of total fund expenses. In 2010, after four years of on-and-off-again negotiations, Eaton Vance acquired the intellectual property of Managed ETFs, co-founded by ETF pioneer Gary Gastineau. The firm held a number of patents designed for active managers.

购买后，伊顿Vance团队，包括导航总裁的斯蒂芬·克拉克，设定为获得证券交易委员会批准。Matthew Witkos，伊顿Vance的分销负责人表示，浮士士们就个人参与了许多细节，看着像Rubik的立方体这样的专利。“我们没有为这家公司付出很多，因为它没有所有的机械事物，”Witkos说。“但是汤姆是一个 - 如果是什么：'如果我们改变这个;如果我们这样做了什么？“他有一个令人难以置信的人才，能够在他的脑海中保持概念，但同时移动所有的碎片并记住他尝试的一切。”

团队在sp会见了美国证券交易委员会(SEC)ring 2011, but it was a period when the agency was largely closed to new products because it was still busy implementing new regulations in the wake of the financial crisis. Two years later Eaton Vance filed for approval of NextShares; it got the commission’s okay in late 2014.

现在，Faust的公司正致力于将产品纳入市场。就其部分而言，伊顿Vance计划推出18个基金，其中17个基于现有战略，包括Richard Bernstein的二次被众所周知的市场古尔图曾经曾经Merrill Lynch＆Co.的市场战略家的策略。浮士必士最终希望所有公司的资金都以nextshares格式进入。但是，NextAres的真正潜力是美国的10万亿美元积极管理资金，这感受到折叠作为指数战略主导基金业务。

伊顿Vance CEO对已签署于NextAres的积极管理人员的名册，包括57亿美元的美国烽火顾问，Mario Gabelli的475亿美元的Gamco投资者，730亿美元的哈特福德资金和370亿美元的胜利资本管理。“This will be successful,” says American Beacon CEO Gene Needles, who was head of distribution for Invesco when it acquired ETF provider PowerShares Capital Management in 2006. “We wouldn’t have thrown our weight behind this if we didn’t think it’s the best solution we’ve seen for active. And when NextShares are successful, other firms will have to follow suit. You’ll have to have it, or you’ll lose market share.”

浮士德通过指出他的公司的研究，表明，如果他们使用NextAres包装，65％的积极资金的横断面将从2007年到2013年开始表现出他们的基准。看看这些基金的实际表现，只有43％的忌击败了他们的靴子。“交易所交易产品相对于传统资金的增长正在杀害积极的管理者，并喂养活跃经理注定要表现不佳的看法，”浮士德说。

1993年，当介绍第一次ETF时，基金业务中只有2％的资产是被动的。今天27％被动地管理。“直到NextAres的出现，”Faust说：“ETF的结构效益仅适用于被动产品。”

Faust believes that NextShares will change the fund management industry. “Active managers are locked into a high-cost, inefficient structure, dooming them to underperform,” he says. “But if you take those same managers and you put them in a better structure, then you can change the competitive dynamic.”

分发头Witkos预计使用NextsCares的活动经理推出真正活跃的策略，看起来与广泛使用的基准和补充核心指数基金不同。这里没有基准Huggers。

Though it has been a long road for Eaton Vance to get NextShares approved and the firm still faces challenges ahead to get investors to accept the new product, Faust isn’t sweating it: “The worst days in the investment industry are better than the best in the sawmill industry.” •

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