Buying stocks is easy – selling them is the difficult bit

Most fund managers don’t beat the market. Yet they are pretty good stock pickers. So what goes wrong?

934_MW_P14_Strategy

A better selling process for most managers

We know that most fund managers fail to beat their underlying benchmarks consistently over the long run, partly because their fees are too high. Any number of studies prove this point. However, this isn't necessarily because managers are bad stock pickers other papers note that managers' "best ideas" tend to beat the market.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.