“The butcher, the baker, the candle-stick maker, the cop on the beat, the housewife—all have one thing in common today: they’re pouring more and more dollars into mutual funds,” so ran a New York Times article – and that was in 1958.
As a radical idea – investing in a large pot of securities – became the norm, the competition for flows has become absurd. Mutual Funds, Index trackers, ETFs…In 2023 there were 137,892 regulated funds. Not all are in direct competition with each other, but it’s still fair to ask:
How can you ever sell the next one?
Fund Marketer is a weekly newsletter covering how the investment management industry bargains with its clients, its regulators, and the markets.
In an industry awash with numbers, products get sold on stories. If you’ve ever wondered why some funds win inflows and others lose out – this is the newsletter for you.
Wait, and you are…?
I’m the founder of FinText, a marketing agency for the investment industry with a software twist: we benchmark content, so we can quantify what clients enjoy. Moneyball, for financial marketing.
Before that, I was creating content for some of the world’s largest banks and investment managers. And before that, I was a machine-learning researcher.
Whenever marketing, investing and AI collide – I’m paying attention.
What's in each edition?
The newsletter has three regular sections:
Top of the pile. A column about the week’s most important happenings.
Treasure corner. Academics love data, and they tend to get excellent access to it. When it comes to the fund industry, they use it to answer two types of questions:
a. If you do X, will it improve flows?
b. If you do Y, will it improve performance?
We take a great interest in questions of the first type, because they test which levers to pull for a better outcome. Each week we’ll be sharing one of those useful levers.
Also happening. Links to the week’s industry stories that are most relevant to sales and marketing. Less about who got flows today, and more on the trends that will win flows tomorrow.
Enjoy!
