Acquired
00:14:18 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:14:18] S0: Okay. Continue the story. [00:14:19] S1: Okay. So one afternoon, Jack's casting about for what would become his thesis topic. He's in Firestone, the main library on campus, and he's reading the current issue of Fortune magazine, where he comes across an article deep in the back of the magazine on page one sixteen entitled big money in Boston. It's about the growth of a relatively new industry of open ended public funds. What today we would call mutual funds. That term wasn't even in use yet. And the article centers on this new firm that's leading this innovation, this new sector on Wall Street, even though they're based in Boston, the Massachusetts Investors Trust Company, known and marketed as MIT. No actual connection to, you know, the real MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but, this gives you a sense of the marketing to the public of these open ended public funds. [00:15:25] S0: We'll see it over and over again on this episode. Appropriating prestige is a signature of the mutual fund industry for really, the the finance industry. [00:15:34] S1: A hallmark of this industry. Absolutely.
00:15:34 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:15:34] S1: A hallmark of this industry. Absolutely. [00:15:37] S0: The interesting thing about this, you might say, well, what do you mean mutual funds were new at this point in time? Well, that comment that I made before the Great Depression in the twenties, only one or 2% of Americans owned stocks. By 1949, that was still only up to 4.2% of Americans. And what they were doing is they were working with a stockbroker to buy individual stocks. There really hadn't been any academic research around finance of any kind yet, let alone sort of investment and diversification and funds. So this notion of you are going to mutually pool your money with a bunch of other investors into a fund and buy a basket of stocks in that fund and hold it for an open ended period of time, these public equities, that was brand new. Yes. And this is [00:16:28] S1: what Jack decides to write his thesis about, this new phenomenon. Now there are actually two important things to talk about here that you started to allude to, Ben. One is this concept of a open end fund versus closed end funds. So this is the real pioneering thing that the Massachusetts Fund, we're not gonna call it MIT here, pioneered, which is there's no set fund size. It's elastic. So it's not like they have to write a prospectus and go out and say, we are raising a $100,000,000 fund and get everybody in it, and then, you know, it gets to a 100,000,000, and then they close it and they manage it. Nope. Could be 1,000,000, could be a 100,000,000, could be 5,000,000,000,000 as we will see approaching towards the end of
00:16:28 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:16:28] S1: what Jack decides to write his thesis about, this new phenomenon. Now there are actually two important things to talk about here that you started to allude to, Ben. One is this concept of a open end fund versus closed end funds. So this is the real pioneering thing that the Massachusetts Fund, we're not gonna call it MIT here, pioneered, which is there's no set fund size. It's elastic. So it's not like they have to write a prospectus and go out and say, we are raising a $100,000,000 fund and get everybody in it, and then, you know, it gets to a 100,000,000, and then they close it and they manage it. Nope. Could be 1,000,000, could be a 100,000,000, could be 5,000,000,000,000 as we will see approaching towards the end of [00:17:16] S0: the year. Dumping more dollars in, and we'll keep buying more stuff in the basket.
00:17:16 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:17:16] S0: the year. Dumping more dollars in, and we'll keep buying more stuff in the basket. [00:17:21] S1: Yep. And that also means that investors in the fund can come and go as they please. There's no lockups. It doesn't have to be a set number. You you buy into the fund. You hold it for a while. Hopefully, it appreciates. You can sell out of the fund. It's everything we know today about mutual funds, but until this concept of an open ended fund was pioneered, you couldn't do this. Now, you mentioned if Americans held stocks at all at this point in time, they held individual stocks through brokers. These funds came to be distributed exactly the same way through stockbrokers. You would call up your Merrill Lynch broker, and instead of saying, hey. Give me five shares of General Electric. You'd say, hey. Give me a couple units of the Massachusetts fund, etcetera, etcetera. [00:18:07] S0: Yep. And so the marketing, the distribution, it relies on this broker dealer network to sort of sell the funds on behalf of the the fund management company itself. [00:18:18] S1: Yep. And the brokers were getting paid by this. [00:18:22] S0: Oh, yes. [00:18:23] S1: Oh, were they ever. So they would take what's called a sales load of usually, like, seven and a half to eight and a half percent of every dollar that a client was putting into the fund. The fund manager would then kick back to the broker as a spiff for putting their clients in the fund.
00:18:23 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:18:23] S1: Oh, were they ever. So they would take what's called a sales load of usually, like, seven and a half to eight and a half percent of every dollar that a client was putting into the fund. The fund manager would then kick back to the broker as a spiff for putting their clients in the fund. [00:18:41] S0: And it's a kickback out of the money that was just invested. So if you're investing a $100 into one of these funds, well, actually, only 91 and a half dollars are going in as the investment, and the rest is going right out as this effectively distribution fee. [00:18:58] S1: Yeah. To your friendly neighborhood stockbroker. [00:19:00] S0: Now the funny thing is if if we didn't have the context that we have today, which is I invest a $100 and basically a $100 goes into the thing that I'm investing in, or at least that's the way it kinda feels. This was normal. Paying for distribution is a very normal thing across every business and every sector. You have to incentivize people to push your product through marketing, through advertising, through sales commissions, through hiring a giant sales force yourself. These are often very large costs. I mean, for example, retailers often double the price of something when they sell it to the public, but the revenue here is not $100. The revenue to the fund is, like, $2 per year in fees. So paying $8 to the broker dealers is a giant egregious amount to sell the product. It's like four times the amount that the fund itself actually makes.
00:19:00 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:19:00] S0: Now the funny thing is if if we didn't have the context that we have today, which is I invest a $100 and basically a $100 goes into the thing that I'm investing in, or at least that's the way it kinda feels. This was normal. Paying for distribution is a very normal thing across every business and every sector. You have to incentivize people to push your product through marketing, through advertising, through sales commissions, through hiring a giant sales force yourself. These are often very large costs. I mean, for example, retailers often double the price of something when they sell it to the public, but the revenue here is not $100. The revenue to the fund is, like, $2 per year in fees. So paying $8 to the broker dealers is a giant egregious amount to sell the product. It's like four times the amount that the fund itself actually makes. [00:19:50] S1: Right. Okay. So that's number one to understand about these new open ended mutual funds. Number two, also might be crazy or not crazy depending on your perspective. These new funds, like the Massachusetts Fund, weren't really set up for the benefit of their customer base, the fund holders. Rather, they were created and organized by the investment managers managers who started and ran them with the express purpose of generating profits for themselves. [00:20:21] S0: Right. It's a business.