BlackRock brass cited 'Aperio' again and again, today, amid analysts' grilling about 'depressed flows' -- it bought the direct-indexing unit in the feverish grab of 2020-2021

Direct indexing is going to mostly be a side business -- you need cash to fund the account to run the indexing and there are fees and set-up involved. The main point though in my opinion is that while direct indexing is a good way to automate the tax harvesting process.... its wrong to show this as the difference between 'tax harvesting' vs 'no tax harvesting'... every advisor tax harvests. so its: [amount of tax harvesting from technology] minus [~20bps in cost to run the automated software] vs [amount of harvesting done without full automation]. Regarding concentrated stock positions and achieving tax losses via tax harvesting, this is fine for the first X dollars but you do have other options like prepaid variable forwards. So again, this is not just as simple as 'direct indexing is better' as a blanket statement.