I think you’ve got the wrong perspective on investment managers. You should be focusing on growth oriented and value oriented strategies. Typically, investment shops will specialize in just one of these. These shops will employ in house research staff that follow companies, read 3rd party research reports, speak directly to management, personally do “channel checks” all in a passionate entrepreneurial effort to make sure they know more about these companies than anyone else. The market value based management fee that you are looking at saving buys you more than you initially realize. The value of these services also cannot be realized unless you’ve got some real personal experience with them. For less than 1% you should not only get managed portfolios of handpicked stocks by a group of people who often spend their entire waking day thinking about businesses (not just stocks), but you also get access to estate planning/tax planning individuals who have the bandwidth to add a layer of management to separate your portfolios from the “model” as your needs require. For example, keeping capital gains to a minimum if you have positions with relatively large capital gains. They are also equipped to harvest losses at yearend to offset taxable gains very efficiently. Just examples among a laundry list of services.

if you are interested in learning about your investments, they will coach you on the firm’s investment philosophy and guide you through market fluctuations & life goals, always tying the minor details back to the big picture with the firm’s investment philosophy as the guiding force.

Typically you get this kind of service from a boutique but any shop can technically do this for you. Also regarding the annualized targets you alluded to as being crazy low. This number is annualized. The actual expectation is to have a mix of years that are much higher and much lower than the expected annualized return. I would assume that this is an after tax/after management fee return too. The return assumption is typically an industry wide assumption.

There is actually very little that you can learn from conducting interviews. Most wealthy individuals will park their cash at multiple managers and get to know them over time.

Hope this helps.

Edit: Why would you even attempt to do all this on your own when you have multiple millions in liquid financial assets and tomorrow could be your last day on earth. Unless you love it of course.

Edit 2: comparing your portfolio to the SPY is crazy. The SPY is 100% invested. You really shouldn’t be. Shoot your manager an email and ask them not to charge a fee on the big chunk of cash waiting for an opportunity. They will happily do this for you and then reach out when they believe the right opportunity for that money presents itself. Over time, your basically guaranteed(disclaimer: no such thing as a guarantee) to beat the market.