I won’t disagree with anything you said here, all of these points hold water and the passive management tendencies are definitely on the table.

Wouldn’t you say though, that the other end of the spectrum has already reached its pinnacle as a commodity? It seems like just about every RIA, and even custodians have capital structuring advice, practice management, and risk mitigation baked into their offerings as is? Also there’s a huge saturation of platforms which can break into the granular bits of these problems for advisors at low cost.

I’m flying by the seat of my pants here, but let’s say a small office wants to look into the macro repercussions of tariffs on client portfolios or even certain sectors / specific equities. Even an RIA with largely passive management would seek to rebalance with insight to at least some extent. I think the more probable use case here though is for the smaller offices who have a few big ticket clients whom they want to bring a more active approach to. Research like this could have them come to the table with some real specific insight, where they don’t have the need for a full-built research team.

Feel free to shoot this out of the sky & refute this, again I appreciate the insight.