Did The Economist miss the point?
Ten days ago, a teaser on the cover of The Economist proclaimed the “Death of the fund manager”. Inside, there was a leader – which is what The Economist calls its editorials – and a lengthy article. Given the tone of the teaser, the content is hardly surprising. It berates financial intermediaries for their greed […]
The performance of asset managers
I have made only one specific investment recommendation on this weblog so far and it has turned out to be rather poor advice, at least in the short term. I questioned the wisdom of investing in the Carlyle IPO almost two years ago. But Carlyle has comfortably outperformed both the market and its sector since […]
Risk adjustment as an excuse
Risk adjustment is a fundamental element of modern portfolio theory. Alpha is defined as the return left over after the impact of all sources of risk, including strategic biases, has been accounted for (see the examples in my series on alpha). But a positive historical alpha alone is not sufficient to conclude that a particular […]
Manager selection and college football
Some years ago, Goyal and Wahal published a somewhat depressing article that suggested that pension funds and their consultants added no value, on average, in their manager hiring and firing decisions. In particular, replacing poorly performing managers with new ones actually led to worse performance than if the fund had stuck with the old managers […]
The best of the best?
By Rolf on 8 October 2014
A few years ago, the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) – Alaska’s sovereign wealth fund with assets of USD 50+ bn (website) – introduced an interesting element into their portfolio. After an exhaustive search, they appointed five asset management firms as external CIOs. They gave each about USD 500 million in a largely unconstrained mandate (the […]
Posted in Comments/ramblings | Tagged Manager selection, Pension funds, Performance | 1 Response