The mounting evidence against fund managers

The idea that active fund managers can beat the market by anything other than luck doesn't stack up. Here's yet more proof.

I've written here several times about the possibility that there is more luck than skill involved in fund management. Further evidence comes from a piece in the FTrunning through a bit of research from Fitch on the performance of emerging market debt funds.

It turns out that they are on the whole "spectacularly unsuccessful" at outperforming any given index. Or even at matching that index. Fitch looked at the 25% of funds which had the best performance record in the period from 2006-8 (ie, that were in the top quartile) and looked to see what happened next.

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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.