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Also is AM at a bank considered buy side too?
Yes
curious too
One's independent and the other is under a corporate parent?
EDIT: not sure why this got MS? The AM arm of a bank is in the exact same business doing the exact same thing as an independent AM firm: offering active or passive fund products in various asset classes / strategies to retail and institutional investors for a fee.
The main difference is the ownership - being under a corporate parent means you're more beholden to corporate bureaucracy, decisions made at the top aren't always in your division's best interests and bonus pools can get torpedoed based on terrible firmwide performance even if the AM division does well.
PWM: servicing wealthy individuals / families and small asset owners then (more often than not) outsourcing the AM part to external managers is not AM. It can be if the firm / group has an in-house investment team with their own funds / strategies but that would only be for the investment team. The advisor is still mostly a relationship manager
Thanks for explaining this it was helpful. Do you know which banks AM divisions are highly ranked? (AM divisions that are separate from the PWM divisions) Also, (as an example using JPM Asset & Wealth Mgmt here) is divisons that are called Asset & wealth mgmt just classifying the two under the same umbrella which are actually 2 separate divisions? Or is this really just the wealth management divison?
Firms like JPM have both. The JP Asset Mgmt has a division that manages assets / builds portfolios, etc like a fund. It also has a division that handles distribution of that asset mgmt to both institutional clients and retail advisors. They also have a Wealth Management arm which is similar to Private Banking dealing directly with ultra high net worth. All of them fall under JPM Asset Mgmt. You have to know which division you are speaking to.
bump
Following -- also interested
Nah, the AM arm of banks is institutional money too.
Regulations are stricter
Could you explain the differences? Is AM at a bank the same thing as PWM at the bank? Or are those two separate divisions and what I'm assuming the banks that call their division 'Asset & Wealth Management' is just PWM?
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