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Rula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Making fun of corporate brands embarrassing themselves online is like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s not difficult, but washing away bloodstains, scales, entrails and half-digested crabs is, so no one wins.
Honestly, what the hell, Franklin?
truly?
Well, maybe Alphaville should tread carefully here, since some readers are seeing ~cough~ A somewhat different approach towards news and commentary as it goes against the mainFT brand.
But like Meb Faber, we prefer our trillion-dollar asset management groups to be boring. Stick to aggressive, sober and so-called smart investing. Don’t tweet that 60/40 retirement portfolios should include “assets” as you happily say “speculation is a feature, not a bug.”
Especially when the asset manager in question is named after Benjamin Franklin, because according to its founder Robert Johnson, “he epitomized the ideas of thrift and wisdom when it comes to saving and investing.”
We realized that Franklin needed to reinvent himself. Despite a wave of aggressive mergers and acquisitions that has swelled its assets to $1.4 trillion, its stock price has declined over the past decade, giving it a current market capitalization of $13.6 billion. That’s less than AppLovin, Domino’s Pizza, and the world’s largest producer of frozen potato chips. It’s barely enough to be included in the S&P 500.
Besides the obvious and well-documented challenges of being a very traditional active asset manager in a world that loves alternatives and mostly passive funds, Franklin also enjoys being a bit old-fashioned.
So promoting cryptocurrencies might seem like a clear and simple way to appear cooler and more exciting.
And yes, if those in charge of the important stuff give control of the X main account to the Bitcoin ETF hype team for a day, who really cares?
But we suggest that Franklin had other priorities.
With about 40 percent of its assets in fixed-income funds, Franklin could benefit from the wave of rising interest rates returning to bonds. So it should focus on fixing the poor performance there — Morgan Stanley points out that its results over five years have been mediocre — rather than tinkering with cryptocurrencies and devaluing its brand with ridiculous stunts (it didn’t work for Tom Brady either). ).
It’s appropriate that I quote Jamie Dimon to end this post.
