Apparently, advisors are from Mars and asset managers are from Venus.

There’s a significant disconnect between what asset managers think financial advisors want and what advisors say they actually need, according to a new report from market research firm Fuse. One of the most striking disconnects was interest in alternative investments, which was listed as a top advisor issue by asset managers. Advisors, however, placed it near the bottom of the rankings in the 13th spot out of 16 topics. Advisors also expressed far stronger interest than managers in marketing, high-net-worth client management and Social Security. Figuring out what advisors want is key if managers want to successfully market their products. Bridging the gap will also help advisors get the investment tools they need to help clients achieve better outcomes.

“I was a little surprised that managers were off the mark to the extent that they were,” said Loren Fox, Fuse’s director of research and the author of the study. “The challenge for asset managers is that many of them need to do a better job of staying on top of what advisors are really interested in.”

What an Advisor Wants

The results underscore a persistent misunderstanding of advisor priorities, Fox said. “Asset managers sometimes overestimate how important investment management-related topics are to advisors. Obviously, that’s the part of the advisor’s business that the asset manager is most keenly interested in,” Fox said. But advisors use, on average, less than a quarter of their time to manage investments, he added, and spend “much more” of their time on things like financial planning.

The two groups did see eye to eye on one thing: Access to market research remained the clearest area of alignment, with more than 80% of both asset managers and advisors having “strong” or “above average” interest. The report also found that three topics had interest differences of more than 20 percentage points:

• Referral strategies, which advisors favored over managers by 25 percentage points.
• Portfolio analysis, which advisors favored by 23 percentage points.
• Estate planning was favored by 21 percentage points.

Can’t We All Get Along? Still, there was agreement in some areas, such as the importance of tax planning and customer relationship management software. “A lot of firms will

poll advisors and get feedback from their sales team, and many will do it on an annual basis,” Fox said. “Putting it on a regular schedule is really the best way to make sure that you’re getting structured, regular feedback … It’s better to find out.”

With the rising costs of healthcare steeply outpacing inflation, could more people afford it by investing in the sector?

That’s part of the idea behind the first two ETFs by longtime healthcare consulting firm Milliman. In November, the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the Milliman Healthcare Inflation Guard (MHIG) and Healthcare Inflation Plus (MHIP) funds. Those will be the first in a broader line of ETFs designed to help address financial risks among workers, retirees, companies, institutions and governments. The move into exchange-traded funds follows three years of work between Milliman’s life and health divisions, said Adam Schenck, principal and managing director of fund services at Milliman Financial Risk Management.

“The idea was, ‘can we turn this into some kind of investment product?’” Schenck said. “Because everybody is having trouble keeping up with healthcare expenses.”

Dissecting the Funds

Using a mix of health industry and related equities, Treasurys, TIPs, corporate bonds, commodities and liquid alternatives, MHIG “will seek to meet the healthcare costs for an average individual utilizing an employer-provided health plan in the US over time,” the company said in an announcement. The other fund, MHIP, will aim to exceed that, by allocating more of its assets to equities. The two products will use a quant model developed from Milliman’s research on the rising costs of healthcare.

There’s a prescription for this:

• The company’s own estimates put the lifetime healthcare costs for a 65-year-old couple retiring in 2025 at an average of $588,000. That’s assuming they enroll in Medicare, and the estimate doesn’t account for long-term care, dental treatments or non-prescription medications.
• Healthcare stocks struggled earlier this year, but there was a rebound last month. The S&P 500 Health Care Index is up 13% year to date, while the broader S&P 500 is up over 15%. However, the S&P 500 has vastly outperformed the healthcare index over three, five and 10 years.
• Healthcare costs have increased by 7% to 8% over the past several years, compared with 2% to 3% for the Consumer Price Index, Schenck said.

The Prognosis: The company’s work with insurance companies and government groups have shown that problems of rising costs, such as those from promising new drugs and treatments, are systemic, said Hans Leida, principal and consulting actuary at Milliman. “All of those stakeholders in one way or another grapple with those problems,” he said. But, “this is personal,” he added. “I see people in my life with needs to save for the future.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the time of the ETFs’ filing, the spelling of Adam Schenck’s name and the timeframe during which healthcare cost increases were measured.

Quiet, please! Genius (Act) at work.

Today, JPMorgan is rolling out its first-ever tokenized money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain, the bank announced on Monday. The move comes after the passage of the Genius Act in July, which created a new nationwide regulatory framework for the burgeoning economy of tokenized-dollar stablecoins. But JPMorgan is capitalizing on not one, but two, booming trends.

Stable Setting

Stablecoins, obviously, are a popular asset class: According to CoinGecko data seen by The Wall Street Journal, the total market cap of all stablecoins has reached $300 billion. That’s staggering, but still small potatoes compared with the enormous growth in demand for money-market funds, whose assets have grown from $6.9 trillion to $7.7 trillion over the course of 2025 alone, according to data from the Investment Company Institute seen by the WSJ.

With the My OnChain Net Yield Fund, or MONY (our hat-tip to whoever coined that one), JPMorgan is offering qualified investors the best of both worlds. (To be clear, qualified investors include individuals with at least $5 million in investments or institutions with at least $25 million, who can invest a minimum of $1 million into MONY). Typical for money-market funds, it invests in safe assets that usually yield more than bank accounts, like US Treasury securities. Meanwhile, the tokenization “provides increased transparency, peer-to-peer transferability and the potential for broader collateral usage within the blockchain ecosystem,” the bank said in a statement on Monday.

Innovative it may be for JPMorgan, but the bank is actually chasing an existing trend on Wall Street:

• The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund launched in March of last year, before the Genius Act, and remains the world’s largest tokenized money-market fund with more than $1.8 billion in assets under management.
• In July, just a week after the passage of the Genius Act, Goldman Sachs and Bank of New York Mellon partnered to launch digital tokens that show ownership of existing money-market funds run by Wall Street institutions.

New Year’s Resolution: Ahead of Congress’s holiday recess, lawmakers have been batting around a second major bill regulating cryptocurrency markets that would split the industry’s oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. On Monday, however, Politico reported that a vote on the bill has now likely been punted until January. Passage of the bill is probably a major New Year’s resolution for the crypto lobby. Well, that and getting bitcoin’s price back above $90,000.