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Flat fee vs percent of AUM

Most traditional wealth managers and subscription platforms charge an Assets Under Management (AUM) fee—typically 1% to 2% of your entire portfolio every single year. At Kairos, we charge a flat monthly fee per research strategy. We believe percentage-based fees create an inherently flawed dynamic for self-directed investors. If you are doing the execution in your own brokerage account, your fee shouldn't increase just because your portfolio grows or the market goes up.

The Compounding Penalty of AUM Fees

A percentage-based fee sounds small on paper, but when compounded over a decade or two, it acts as a massive structural drag on capital accumulation. Traditional managers charge you based on the size of your bucket, not the amount of work required to maintain the strategy.

The Flat-Fee Edge: With a flat membership fee, your cost of research remains completely fixed. Whether you choose to reference our models to handle $100k or $1M, your overhead does not change.

Keep Your Compounding Outperformance: By keeping your research costs flat, you preserve the compounding power of your capital. Every dollar saved on structural fees remains in your account, compounding for your own balance sheet rather than a manager's pocket.

Alignment, Not Assets

Traditional firms are incentivized to maximize "Assets Under Management" because their revenues scale with gathering capital, not necessarily outperforming the market. This often shifts their focus from deep quantitative research to aggressive asset gathering and marketing.

As a research publisher, Kairos operates differently. We design and track systematic models that we trade with our own capital. By charging a transparent, flat membership fee for access to our platform and analytics, our incentives are simple: we publish high-conviction, mathematically rigorous models, and you pay a flat, predictable rate for the data.

Is a Flat-Fee Research Model Right for You?

This model is explicitly designed for sophisticated, self-directed market participants who recognize the value of rules-based frameworks but refuse to pay an asset-percentage tax to a middleman.

A Quick Mathematical Reality Check: If you utilize a model strategy to navigate a $200,000 allocation, a traditional 1% AUM fee costs you $2,000 annually. As your capital grows to $500,000, that same 1% fee skyrockets to $5,000 a year—for the exact same underlying strategy data.

A flat-rate subscription ensures that as your capital grows, your operational efficiency grows with it.

Secure an edge without the asset tax.

If you are an independent operator who handles your own execution, paying a percentage of your wealth to an asset manager is a structural drag on your compounding growth. Kairos provides the institutional-grade quantitative framework; you retain the control, the custody, and the upside.

Apply for membership today to unlock our strategy data, live settings, and comprehensive model tracking.

Explore our quantitative research models

Review our suite of systematic model strategies, analyze the historical data and backtested parameters, and compare our transparent flat-rate membership pricing. Kairos operates on an application-only basis to maintain a community of sophisticated, independent market operators.

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