Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Private Assets Need Public Buyers

Goldman/T. Rowe

The basic situation in asset management is that the alternatives managers have the products and the traditional managers have the customers. For a long time, the way normal people invested was through mutual funds run by traditional asset managers like T. Rowe Price or Fidelity. These managers run active mutual funds, charge fees on the order of tens of basis points, and have accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars of customer assets. And they have good distribution: They have relationships with investment advisers, who put their clients in the managers’ funds; they have good brand names and advertising; they run funds ...