Non-Profits Get Their Day (Part 4)

In non-profit world, there are two approaches to providing investment advice; unfortunately, "imprudent speculation" is the dominant choice.

W. Scott Simon

 

In this month’s column, I’ll explore the approach used by most investment in providing investment advice to fiduciaries of non-profits.

In the non-profit world, there are two starkly different approaches to providing investment advice. Those that follow the dominant approach, which can be thought of as “imprudent speculation,” focus on what’s best for the business model they follow. Those that follow the other, less well-known approach, which can be thought of as “prudent investing,” focus on what’s best for beneficiaries of non-profits.

Imprudent Speculation

It’s important for fiduciaries of non-profits to understand how the dominant approach to providing investment advice–imprudent speculation–can, in many instances, undermine the long-term interests of their beneficiaries and what a threat it can be to their charitable missions.

I’ve discussed in previous columns that those investing in stocks believed to offer the best odds of maximizing expected return–without consciously taking risk into consideration—are speculators, not investors, according to Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz, the father of modern portfolio theory. The fundamental value that imprudent speculators say that they bring to the table is the ability to tell their clients today which investments will be winners in the future, whether through stock picking, market timing or track record investing.

Part of the problem with imprudent speculation is that those engaged in it simply don’t want, legally, to be fiduciaries to the non-profit fiduciaries (and by extension, the beneficiaries of such fiduciaries) they advise. That’s why they consciously choose a business model that prevents them from doing so. An investment advisor such as a registered representative following this model is required to swear fealty to its broker-dealer master, the only entity that the stockbroker owes any duties. Non-profits better duck if they get in the way of this principal-agent relationship because when push comes to shove, their interests will always be subordinated to those of the registered representative’s broker-dealer.

Another problem with the dominant approach to providing investment advice is that it’s designed to maintain the often outrageous (i.e., “inappropriate” and “unreasonable” in fiduciary legal-speak) profitability of the business model upon which it’s based. That’s why I’ve called stock brokerage firms and other entities that adopt this model “non-fiduciaries” in my series on nonfiduciary investment consultants. What many of these advisors want, such as charging high, hidden costs, is very different from what best serves the interests of beneficiaries of non-profit portfolios, such as low, transparent costs.

Many fiduciary board members of non-profits have no understanding of these problems for the simple reason that they are not even aware that they exist. Those fiduciaries that do understand them often look the other way. Many of them just will not admit that they’re wrong in the choices they have made–even in the face of overwhelming evidence showing that those engaged in imprudent speculation have led such board members to invest in costly and underdiversified portfolios over, say, the last five years, 10 years, or 20 years. In such situations, the usual outcome is for the board members to circle the wagons, and refuse to change.

The Attraction of Imprudent Speculators

Investment advisors that engage in imprudent speculation are very attractive to many fiduciaries of non-profits. First of all, many of them work for entities such as stock brokerage firms, insurance companies, banks, trust companies, and others. These entities often are prestigious and some of them are huge, employing thousands, managing billions and safekeeping trillions. They provide good cover to fiduciaries who believe that if they hire them, they will help make the fiduciaries look good–or at least they won’t make them look bad.

A second reason why investment advisors engaged in imprudent speculation are very attractive to fiduciaries of non-profits is that they are always very personally likable. The affability of these salespersons is what makes it so difficult to dislodge them as advisors to fiduciaries of nonprofits–even in cases where they have inflicted disastrous results on non-profit portfolios. That emotional attachment can be very hard to break. Sometimes, of course, the issue is even deeper: the emotional inability, as I’ve noted, to admit a mistake. People generally resist change, but to convince them to change because of a mistake they have made (even one they acknowledge) is really difficult.

Many investment advisors to non-profits engaged in imprudent speculation attempt to portray themselves as “institutional” advisors to avoid being thought of as advisors to mere individual retail investors. An example of this that I ran across recently involved a non-profit with more than $50 million in its portfolio. The “institutional” investment advisor involved was a group of five people at a branch office of a well-known stockbrokerage firm. The head of this group attempted to sell the baffled fiduciaries of the non-profit a complex, illiquid investment product that, no doubt, was burning a hole in the pocket of the stock brokerage firm’s inventory. (If you take away nothing else from this article, remember that complex, illiquid investment products are always very expensive.)

If the head of this group really thought that he was in an institutional relationship with the nonprofit, he would never have dared attempt to fob off this surplus inventory on the fiduciaries. What was really happening in this example was that even though the group at the stock brokerage firm posed as an institutional advisor, it treated such non-profit clients as retail investors that wouldn’t (and didn’t) squawk when they were charged retail rates. Investing and managing over $50 million at retail rates instead of institutional rates, of course, is in the best interests of the stock brokerage firm, not the beneficiaries of this non-profit. This happens, incredible as it may seem, in many such situations involving non-profits with up to $100 million or even more in their portfolios.

In any event, no fiduciary of a non-profit should ever be under the illusion that the kind of investment advisors I have just described reached their station at their respective employers on the basis of much more than their sales abilities. Silver tongues and gold wristwatches are not necessarily good indicators of the worth that such advisors bring to beneficiaries of non-profits. In fact, people like the head of the group in this example are little more than extremely likable backslappers. They receive marching orders to hawk the latest investment products to non-profit fiduciaries, products that institutional investors savvy to the ways of such imprudent speculators have already rejected.

Imprudent Speculators and Surplus Complexity

Many imprudent speculators focus on “manager selection” (sometimes even venturing outside their offices to “kick the tires” of managers in their selection “process”) to find, for example, a third party “wrap manager” with a great “reputation” who is “the best” because it has an outstanding “track record” over the last three to five years. They are, as a result, happy to supply fiduciaries with colorfully illustrated mountain charts showing how outstandingly well, for example, the third parties they hired performed. Fiduciaries of non-profits are sometimes literally bowled over by the huge volume of marketing and sales materials, thick prospectuses and blizzards of press releases that imprudent speculators thrust at them.

All this “activity” is a good example of what futurist Alvin Toffler calls “surplus complexity.” In the investment world, imprudent speculators use surplus complexity to make investing appear more complex than it really is. Surplus complexity, in the context of this column, is designed to confuse fiduciaries of non-profits. The ultimate purpose of this confusion is to ensure that imprudent speculators are able to fill the resultant information void and sell their clients unnecessarily high cost investment products, which are often accompanied by an absence of meaningful services.

Indeed, the “stuff” that imprudent speculators push at these fiduciaries–manager selection, manager reputations, track records, reams and reams of marketing and sales materials, press releases and the like–is so confusing and time consuming to read that the fiduciaries literally throw up their hands and surrender to imprudent speculators happy to keep their marketing departments cranking out such nonsense. This surrender often results in costly, underdiversified non-profit portfolios.

The surplus complexity favored by imprudent speculators, in reality, is just a lot of mumbo jumbo. The problem is that the return generated by an investment during any particular time period is a random variable over which no one has any control. As a result, investment advisors to non-profits that place an undue emphasis on the random variable of return engage in imprudent conduct in a number of ways. First, by focusing excessively on return, they define investment prudence in terms of portfolio performance, not fiduciary conduct. That is directly contrary to how the Uniform Prudent Investor Act (UPIA), as well as other bodies of fiduciary law, defines prudence: in terms of fiduciary conduct not portfolio performance. Second, an undue emphasis on return violates the “central consideration” of all investment fiduciaries under the UPIA: Determine the tradeoff between return and risk in a portfolio.

An excessive focus on return also confuses fiduciaries by diverting their attention from the factors that can really reduce risk and increase return: broad diversification and minimization of costs and taxes. Diversification and the minimization of costs and taxes, no doubt, are not very sexy topics. They are also problematic for the average bear: “So what do you actually mean when you say, for example, that broad diversification reduces portfolio risk and increases return at the same time?” In all the materials that imprudent speculators thrust at fiduciaries of nonprofits, there’s no meaningful discussion of, let alone emphasis on, broad diversification of risk. Yet broad diversification creates the only dependable “free lunch” in investing: reduced risk and increased return at the same time.

Imprudent speculators placing an undue emphasis on return also tend to add or delete investments willy-nilly from client portfolios. This often results in holding investments with risk and return parameters that have little relation to each other within the context of a portfolio. This is due in no small part to the way in which imprudent speculators do business: they come to their clients with “ideas” concerning new investment products which should be bought and which old ones should be sold. This non-portfolio mindset, which tends to think in terms of “bits and pieces,” inevitably creates underdiversified and costly portfolios stuffed haphazardly with a hodgepodge of investments.

A non-portfolio mindset is exactly contrary to that required by modern prudent fiduciary investing: one that thinks in terms of the supreme primacy of a portfolio (not its individual bits and pieces) which should be broadly diversified to reduce risk, and have low costs and taxes—all of which increase return. There is an alternative approach to providing investment advice to fiduciaries of non-profits that is in accord with these standards of modern prudent fiduciary investing. That approach, which is legally sound, academically based, and cost efficient, is the subject of my next column.

W. Scott Simon is an expert on the Uniform Prudent Investor Act, Restatement (Third) of Trusts and Title I of ERISA. He provides services as a consultant and expert witness on fiduciary investment issues in depositions, arbitrations and trials as well as in written opinions. Simon is the author of two books including The Prudent Investor Act: A Guide to Understanding. He is a member of the State Bar of California, a Certified Financial Planner® and an Accredited Investment Fiduciary Analyst™. The author’s views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Morningstar.

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