Introducing the Triad Brief

Independent advisors already have too much to read.

That’s the reason we built this. The Triad Brief is our answer to a question I hear from members constantly: “What do I actually need to be paying attention to?”

Twice a month, this is our signal. What’s moving in the independent space. What our best coaches, wealth strategists, and operators are seeing inside real firms. What’s worth your time and what isn’t.

I got a preview of what this could look like at the Do Business. Do Life. Founders’ Retreat last month. Ben Nemtin gave one of the most memorable keynotes I’ve heard in years on the regrets people carry to the end of their lives and how few of them have anything to do with money. That’s the balance every good advisor holds. Not just the numbers, but what numbers make possible.

The Triad Brief exists to help you hold both. No filler. No Noise. Just the stuff that helps you build the kind of business worth having and a life worth living.

See you in your inbox in two weeks,

-Brad Johnson, co-founder of Triad Partners

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Brent Coggins, CIO | Triad Wealth Partners

I read a lot of financial publications and investment white papers (nerd alert!), and one I look forward to every year is the Mind the Gap study from Morningstar. This paper analyzes the universe of mutual funds and ETFs and quantifies a) the average annual total return of these funds, broken down by categories such as asset class, fees, volatility, fund flows, etc., and b) the performance of the average dollar invested in those funds over the trailing 10 years. This latter stat is the investor return, as it captures what investors actually made in these funds when factoring in cash flows in and out of each fund. 

Every year I read this study, and every year I know the ending: investor returns lag fund returns across the board, and by a not insignificant margin. This lag is referred to as "the gap", and despite the title of the paper I do in fact mind it.

For the 10-year period ending 2025, the average investor return (+8.7%) was 1.2% lower than the average fund return (+9.9%). What does that mean in dollar terms? See below from Jeffrey Ptak, the author of the study (emphasis mine): 

"As of Jan. 1, 2016, the open-end funds and ETFs included in the study held around $13.6 trillion in aggregate net assets. Had those assets hypothetically been left untouched, compounding at 9.9% per year until the end of the period, they’d have been worth nearly $35 trillion in aggregate. But in reality, these funds held $29.7 trillion in total as of Dec. 31, 2025, the shortfall largely explained by around $3.8 trillion in estimated timing-related effects."

There are several theories that help explain this gap, but the root cause comes down to poorly timed cash flows in and out of these funds, often driven by performance-chasing behavior amongst investors.

Funds perform well, thereby attracting assets, followed by underperformance which leads to outflows. This cycle repeats across just about every category and time period, no one has been safe not even target-date funds (as represented by the Allocation category below):

However, this year there was an exception. One style of investing actually had a "positive gap" between fund and investor returns: Buffer ETFs.

To see what surprising findings the study revealed about Buffer ETFs and the impact on investments, read the full article. Read more →

⏵ September is Life Insurance Awareness Month. (LIMRA)

A good reminder that our industry has a real role to play in educating consumers about how life insurance protects families' financial security. The Q2 numbers are encouraging. U.S. individual life insurance new annualized premium rose 3% year over year to $4.7 billion, with policy count up 8%. Policy count outpacing premium suggests more households are entering the market, not just larger cases.

⏵ Inc. 5000 drops its 2026 list. (Inc. 5000)

Inc. released its annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America, with independent financial firms well represented across the ranks (Triad landed at No. 1,161). Industry awards like this are one of the clearer external signals that vision, disciplined execution, and a real growth engine are working together.

⏵ RIAs are winning the recruitment war. (InvestmentNews)

New Cerulli research shows independent and hybrid RIAs grew AUM at 10.9% and 12.2% annualized over the past decade. Ninety-seven percent of independent RIAs say they would only switch to another independent. The channel is still on the rise.

⏵ Advisor wellbeing hit a new high. (Kitces)

Advisor wellbeing clocked in at 7.3 on a 10-point scale, up from 6.8 in 2023. The reported "sweet spot" for advisor happiness sits between 40 and 100 client households. Worth thinking about the next time you consider adding capacity.

⏵ The leveraged ETF trap. (Business Insider)

New reporting looks at leveraged single-stock ETFs, a category now managing more than $200 billion in AUM, and how their daily reset mechanics can turn a correct directional bet into an almost total loss. Triad Wealth CIO Brent Coggins is quoted throughout on "volatility decay" and why the math punishes investors even when they're right.

Triad Member Vision Coaches

Most advisors are strong at talking about their services. Fewer are strong at articulating why their firm exists. That gap matters, because clients don't follow services. They follow meaning.

Three things must work together for a firm's vision to take root:

Break one and the whole system breaks.

·       Vision without a message creates confusion.

·       Message without belief becomes performance.

·       Belief without vision drifts.

Here's the underrated part: belief is behavioral. It drives behavior, behavior produces outcomes, and those outcomes either reinforce the belief or reshape it. And it doesn't stop with you. Belief is contagious: One person's is personal; a whole team's is transformational.

If you held a mirror up to your firm's culture right now, what belief would it reflect? Whatever the answer, that's what your clients are picking up on. Not the tagline on your website. Not the framing on your seminar slides. The belief that's actually lived inside the team.

The reset is simple. Say your vision like you mean it. But only after you've decided that you do.

Ben Nemtin, cofounder of The Buried Life and New York Times bestselling author of The Bucket List Journal, sat down with Brad after keynoting the DBDL Founders’ Retreat. The conversation lands on a reframe every advisor should hear: your job isn’t money manager. It’s dream manager.

Listen to Episode #183 of the DBDL Podcast→

⏵ Most financial advisors are thinking about AI all wrong. A recent Wealth Management article featured insights from Brad and Michael Hyatt, unpacking the gap between AI as a productivity toy and AI as a business lever. Read More →

⏵ Quin Kilgore: AI is only as good as your data. Triad’s CTO joined the DBDL podcast to unpack why most financial firms are setting themselves up to lose with AI before they’ve even started. His thesis: AI is an amplifier. Feed it clean, portable client data and it multiplies your team’s leverage. Feed it messy data and it multiplies your problems. A tactical, non-hyped walk-through of what advisors should be doing right now. Listen Here →

⏵ The AI Ascension Assessment. Michael Hyatt’s five-minute diagnostic scores where you are on the AI adoption curve and where to focus next. Take it →

⏵ AI can give financial advice. Sort of. Researchers ran ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity through real client-style questions. The answers were practical, but the blind spots were bigger than expected. Read More →

Ask advisors who’ve come through a Triad Sales Lab what changed, and you tend to hear the same thing. More than the tactics, it was finding out where they were leaving business on the table.

One Triad Member, JP, put it this way after his session earlier this year:

The next Sales Lab runs October 8-11, at Triad headquarters in Lawrence, Kansas. Hands-on coaching, case studies from Members who’ve scaled, and the frameworks for winning first appointments and closing clients.

Apply for a Triad Sales Lab →

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