I’ll save you the click; the meat of the discussion goes something like this: * Financial advisors love models, and they simplify portfolio management for good reason. * ETF issuers put their own ETFs in their free model portfolios. This should surprise literally nobody. * There’s an academic paper that says the ETFs in models aren’t great. First, about the paper. I could spend a lot of ink poking holes at some of their conclusions and the way they used the data, but for the purposes of my thoughts here, let’s assume that they are 100% correct in two conclusions they make. The first is that model changes drive flows. This is pretty inarguable, and we’ve seen these effects for over a decade. When a major model provider decides it’s time to get into micro-cap toiletry companies, they pop. Their second point is that the funds inside models are somehow more expensive and perform worse than those not in models. There are huge apples/oranges problems in any analysis like this, which the study glosses over, but again, let’s just pretend they’re totally right. Does this mean you should dump your model? Probably not. But should you be asking yourself what your model’s doing for you in the first place? Absolutely.