If private investors in America's stock-markets are proving remarkably sanguine about market convulsions, the investment-management firms that cater for them are having second thoughts about whom they want to serve. At the gilded end of the spectrum, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch are keen to get rid of the poorer portion of their affluent clients, often pushing them kicking and screaming from personalised brokers to managed funds that cost more, but deliver less in terms of service. At the plebeian end of the investment market, mutual-fund firms are quietly getting rid of their poorest clients too, by raising the minimum sums that may be invested, and by closing distribution channels that are cheap for investors. Not before time, the shift reflects a better understanding of how each customer contributes to a firm's profits. The understanding involves a painful recognition: that today's small customer is unlikely to become the Warren Buffett of the future. Punters may still believe that Wall Street, one day, will make them rich. Wall Street itself no longer buys that. That change signals the end of an era in which nobody was considered too small to participate in the capital bit of capitalism.
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