In case any active managers needed reminding, asset consulting firm Frontier Advisors has confirmed that 2024 was the most challenging year for global active equity managers in more than two decades.
The task of standing out in a crowded market place is not getting easier for product providers. Generative AI may hold the key, Michael Kollo says.
While some may have gotten a little kick out of watching the tall poppies of the investment landscape get cut down over the last decade, it’s worth remembering that stock pickers provide critical degrees of diversification and balance to the ecosystem. It may have been a tough old decade, but this cohort is nothing if not resilient.
While PwC expects the asset and wealth management sector to see a rebound in assets under management by 2027, it predicts a vastly changed landscape in which the top 10 per cent of managers will control half of all mutual fund assets globally.
While active management can provide pockets of outperformance both here and globally, research from S&P Global suggests maintaining above-benchmark returns is difficult to maintain.
Eschewing the traditional route, Spatium Capital founders Nicholas Quinn and Jesse Moors grew their short-holding, long-only small companies managed fund from the seeds of a separately managed account.
While the market is broadly underweight China, South African-based Foord Asset Management is confident that President Xi Jinping’s economic plan for the country will bear fruit over time.
Recent market turbulence has brought market neutral long short strategies into primacy, with funds able to look at companies with a clear lens and avoid taking large binary positions.
