How to pick a fund manager

To be successful at growing your wealth, there are various character traits a fund manager must have, says Merryn Somerset Webb. Above all, he must be cheap.

I was asked to speak at a seminar put on by a big fund management group this week. I was to talk about the pros and cons of active' and passive' investing and give the 'final answer' on which serves investors best.

This was a pretty brave call from a firm devoted to active management, given the stand MoneyWeek has taken over the years on fund-manager overcharging and incompetence. But it wasn't quite as bad as you might think - mostly because there isn't really any such thing as passive investing.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.