In the institutional marketplace, strange as it may seem, it is possible for a money manager to profit more from soft dollars than from the negotiated assetmanagementfee he receives.
It is common for these funds to charge a performance fee, based on the success they have pursuing their investment strategy, in addition to an asset-based managementfee, based on the amount of money provided by investors.
For the AssetManagement division, the fee as percentage of assets under management decreased from 0.7% in 2005 to 0.2% in 2009, with Morgan Stanley cutting fees to hold on to clients in an increasingly competitive market.