Top 10 Fund Families Recommended by Advisors: 2013

When it comes to naming names, advisors pick all the big companies — the PIMCOs and the iShares of the mutual fund and ETF worlds — as their favorite fund purveyors, according to Phoenix Marketing International.

But interesting details emerge in the survey results — especially when the responses are broken down according to the affiliation models of individual advisors.

Phoenix’s semiannual survey of financial advisors was conducted in November among 1,318 advisors who recommend securities, retirement services and/or insurance products to their clients. It asked advisors which brand of funds they were most likely to recommend in the next six months.

Registered investment advisors picked low-fee index investing giant Vanguard as their favorite, while broker-dealer reps heavily favored American Funds.

“My gut reaction when I saw the survey results was that the underlying funds used probably had to do with fee structures,” Terrance Reilly of the investment management practice of the Philadelphia law firm Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads, told ThinkAdvisor when last November’s survey was released, in April. “RIAs are used to charging management fees, so they’re willing to put clients in a fund on a no-load basis, as opposed to the full-service [wirehouse] firms which charge a more traditional commission-based fee structure.”

Following are advisors’ 10 favorite fund families — ranked by both the advisors’ overall brand impression and which brands they would recommend — sorted by advisor affiliations. The rankings include data from both the May and November surveys.

(Bill McNabb, CEO and Chairman of Vanguard.)

Registered Investment Advisors

1. Vanguard
2. iShares
3. PIMCO
4. PowerShares
5. BlackRock
6. State Street
7. Fidelity
8. American Funds
9. WisdomTree
10. Franklin Templeton

(Larry Fink, CEO and Chairman of Blackrock Financial Management, Inc.)

National Full-Service Firms

1. BlackRock
2. iShares
3. American Funds
4. JPMorgan Chase
5. Wells Fargo
6. PIMCO
7. TD Ameritrade
8. Franklin Templeton
9. PowerShares
10. Fidelity