Total assets under management (AUM) of investment advisors registered at the U.S. SEC surpassed $128 trillion in 2021. How is there so much money sitting in investments? If the global GDP is only $96~ trillion, how is this possible? I know GDP and AUM are unrelated; the AUM just seems like an incomprehensible amount of money. Thanks in advance!
This article explains in a bit more detail: [https://www.fa-mag.com/news/ria-firms-top-record–110t-aum–60-million-clients–iaa-reports-62858.html](https://www.fa-mag.com/news/ria-firms-top-record–110t-aum–60-million-clients–iaa-reports-62858.html)
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You kind of answered it yourself, GDP and AUM are not comparable measures by a long shot. If you think this is a big number, what’s really gonna melt your skull is that the article is talking about registered investment advisors (RIAs), one specific type of investment firm. That *excludes* a considerable portion of assets on the brokerage side of any business that’s registered as both an RIA and a brokerage–you don’t have to report brokerage AUM to the SEC. And those dually registered firms are often the biggest: Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Edward Jones, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, etc. are all dually registered. Those companies alone add many trillion to the original figure. This also doesn’t include most hedge funds and other private funds that dont have to report AUM to the SEC. I’m not sure what the total number of all assets at any investment firm is, but it’s a hell of a lot more than $128T.
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