John O’Connell Featured in Wealth Solutions Report: Is Your Firm Over-Trading Because Technology Makes It Easy?

John O’Connell wrote this piece for Wealth Solutions Report on why RIAs facing Schwab’s new $5 block trade fee should look at trading discipline before touching their pricing. Most firms can reduce their fee exposure  through trading discipline alone, before any conversation about pricing strategy becomes necessary, he argues. Re-balancing frequency, drift bands, and overlapping models often reflect technological convenience rather than deliberate policy, and John lays out five areas for a firm’s CIO and CCO to audit. The same logic applies to direct indexing: firms need to know whether the net tax benefit they deliver to clients still exceeds the explicit trading costs they may now incur on the client’s behalf, run at the account level, not the strategy level. His takeaway is that operational discipline should come first, reducing cost exposure without touching client relationships and setting up any later pricing conversation from stronger footing.