"Where Are the Customers' Yachts?" is the title of a famous 1940 book by Fred Schwed Jr., a former Wall Street trader turned writer. It's a satirical critique of the financial services industry, and the title itself comes from an old anecdote (which Schwed recounts in the book) about a visitor to New York who is shown the impressive yachts owned by bankers and brokers docked in the harbor. When the visitor naively asks where the customers' yachts are, the joke — and the point — is that the customers don't have any yachts, despite having paid enormous sums in fees and commissions to the financial professionals who do.
The anecdote, and the book that popularized it, is meant to illustrate a recurring critique of Wall Street and the investment industry: that financial advisors, brokers, and money managers often profit handsomely regardless of whether their advice or products actually make money for their clients. The yachts belong to the people selling financial advice and investment products, not to the customers who bought them.
The book remains a classic of financial literature precisely because its central joke has aged well — critics of the mutual fund industry, hedge funds, and financial advisory fees still invoke it today to question whether the enormous fees charged by the industry are justified by the returns delivered to ordinary investors. It's frequently recommended reading in finance and investing circles, alongside other classics like "The Intelligent Investor," not for technical investment advice (much of its specific market commentary is dated) but for its enduring skepticism about incentives and conflicts of interest in the financial industry.
So, quite literally, there are no "customers' yachts" — that's the entire punchline and the moral of the story.