Fidelity Investments Institutional Brokerage Group and Frank Russell announced an alliance in which Fidelity will distribute Russell's new multi-manager separately managed account program through its registered investment advisors and correspondent broker/dealers.
Russell's program, called Russell Managed Portfolios, is designed to allow RIA's and correspondent broker/dealers to target high-net-worth clients with sophisticated investing needs, said David Denison, president of Fidelity IBG, on a media conference call.
The program, which has a minimum initial investment of $300,000, offers 12 multi-manager portfolio mixes with varying market categories and investment objectives, each with two to five unaffiliated investment managers that have been selected by Russell. Those are: Garner Lewis Asset Management, Marsico Capital Management, Gulf Investment Management, Parametric Portfolio Associates, ICM Asset Management, Rainier Investment Management, J.P. Morgan Fleming Asset Management, Thornburg Investment Management, Kayne Anderson Rudnick Investment Management, Turner Investment Partners and KR Capital Advisors. Russell will continually monitor and evaluate its manager selections, according to the company. The companies did not disclose the pricing structure of the program because it is variable depending on the size of the account and the asset mix.
Russell Managed Portfolios is scheduled to be operational on Nov. 5. It will initially be available only through RIA's on Fidelity's institutional brokerage platform, but is expected to be available to correspondent broker/dealers in 2002, the company said.
This month, Fidelity will introduce the new program to the advisors on its platform. Then early in November and December the firm will undertake a national road show introducing it to advisors in 11 cities.
For the past three years, Frank Russell has been looking at the high-net-worth market to research tax aware managers and, over the past two years, has been analyzing separate account programs and has formed a leading RIA advisory board. "We realized that we just did not have the scale or the investment capacity to have our own state of the art platform," said Russell CEO Mike Phillips.
