Dmitriy --

Thanks for the kind words. I'll return them -- great thoughts. I agree with you that folks with less than 100k shouldn't pay fees, and I'm actually in the middle of laying out the reason why right now. I'm not sure about raising an asset based fee as the assets in the account rise -- as Michael notes below I bet folks would find a way around that. Age based fees are tough too, since they don't necessarily relate to the services that are provided even though they're likely to. Folks nearing the retirement age need more advice.

This means that there needs to be some other way to charge for the value-added services that you rightly note are more important as you get richer and older. I'm not entirely sure where the line should be drawn between things that cost extra and things that come with the free, but tax and estate planning seem like the sorts of things that should have standalone cost.

To your elephant, I'm not necessarily sure that the natural result of concentration in index funds would even be observable. Since active managers net out to the market, we already hold an aggregate exposure that is the same as what we'd have if we all held the same cap-weighted index fund.

I'm also not sure that a free investment account necessarily implies a passive one. There's no particular reason that active products can't be free for small investors too. They do cost more to deliver than passive products, but costs are falling in general. A fee structure that's "free till you get rich" might be a good way to build a stable investor base for a newly established active firm.

Thanks as always for reading!

Will