Several advisors debated the pros and cons of direct indexing on Thursday and Friday after Michael Kitces, head of planning strategy at Buckingham Wealth Partners and co-founder of XY Planning Network, tweeted that Charles Schwab's plan to launch a direct indexing platform in early 2022 means Schwab is "declaring war on funds."
Kitces cited a comment Charles Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger made at the Schwab Impact conference on Tuesday: "The idea that I'm going to take my money and simply turn it over to some fund or an ETF and just trust that that manager or maybe trust that that index is going to invest the way I want" is no longer realistic.
Kitces included a link to a ThinkAdvisor report that quoted Bettinger.
In response to Kitces, Scott Salaske, an advisor and CEO of RIA Firstmetric, tweeted: "'Personalized [Direct] Indexing' is code for plain old active management stock picking to justify adviser job security and high fees. Don't let the word 'indexing' confuse anyone. It's not index investing. You don't need 100's or even 1000's of individual stocks."
Jumping into the debate with advisors was Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg Intelligence senior ETF analyst, who tweeted he agreed with Salaske, adding that direct indexing would probably find a "small niche … relative to the hype. I've never been wrong betting against things trying to dislodge a 3bp total market index fund of ETF."
However, Rick Ferri, an advisor and CEO of Ferri Investment Solutions, pointed out that the complexity of direct indexing would only be a positive for his business, tweeting: "Complexity is job security."
