As a trader, FUM figures seem to be a quarterly surprise packet...

As a trader, FUM figures seem to be a quarterly surprise packet that gets the market's imagination firing, and also only takes me minutes to update my spreadsheet, and has been very profitable to trade, even if in many instances it is only statistical noise. Trading the semi annual reports is also something I do with many stocks, but is more time consuming and error prone. I have not really found an edge in IFL (or similar) at this stage, other than if there is a "fractal" event or news. But every now and then I suddenly grok something about a market sector - until then - I like to kick around ideas and perceptions and learn as much as possible. It may be that the context of the sector changes soon and I will find a metric, factor or combo that will have some short term predictive power.

As an investor, it is interesting that ratios for IFL would show an equity ratio of about 60%, and thus the ROA appears quite low, when there is about a billion dollars of statutory funds on both sides of the balance sheet that net each other out. Netting that out, you get an equity ratio of about 85%, and the ROA moves from around 6% to around 9%. Do you or does anybody understand if IFL shareholders solely gain ticket clipping exposure to these statutory funds (assuming no lawsuits etc), or are their deeper potential liabilities hidden there? Or am I on the wrong tangent altogether?