Iconoclastic means you want to tear down the idols in a sense. So what exists is not necessarily what should be.

Asset management is in a bad equilibrium. There's a lot of self-reinforcing components that keep it operating, but it's operating more for itself than for its clients.

The industry is good at extracting value from clients, not as good at creating value for clients.

Why?

I think it is a function of the industry characteristics:

1. It's a complex industry. There's lots of moving parts.

2. It's opaque. You usually don't have enough information to fully know what's going on.

3. It's dynamic, so things are moving all the time.

In that type of environment, it is much easier to take value than to create value, because clients have an information asymmetry problem. They usually don't know as much or are not as skilled as intermediaries.

And so the intermediaries, they might attempt to create value for their clients. But in the end, they find it's actually much easier to take value from clients, and that becomes quite a large amount of money in the end.

It is time for change.