In Asset Management, Does Personality Matter?

这位明星组合经理是一种好奇的现象。这是我的同事，Julie Segal和我讨论ss quite often. All the more so during the drama of the past two weeks. TheBill Gross–PIMCO dustup— and bond legend Gross’s departure to Janus Capital Group, where he started today — shows just how vulnerable even a $1.9 trillion asset management firm can be to its talent.

For an asset management firm, how valuable is the star system? Do personality portfolio managers really perform better, or can a team approach be just as effective? And how many truly best-in-class money managers are there? After all, by definition most people are going to be at or below average, and in the benchmarked asset management industry it is notoriously hard to consistently outperform over time.

明星系统的吸引力是显而易见的。星星是可销售的。是的，他们也可能是良好的股票选择者或债券投资者，但投资业务也是关于讲故事的。人民 - 个人或机构投资者 - 喜欢投资人民。亚博赞助欧冠当我们写下资产经理 - 就像我在峡谷合作伙伴那里刚刚在我的特色中一样，“Canyon Capital Thrives in a Transforming Financial Landscape,” for example — we write about the process and what they do. But for me at least, the more compelling parts of the story concern the personalities themselves. There is good reason for this. It’s not just that people are easier to relate to than investment concepts or capital structures, though that is true. As a fiduciary or an individual investor, you want to have confidence in the person managing your money. People can also go on TV. Bill Gross might have been reluctant to travel east of the Rockies, but he was, and no doubt will continue to be, a genius at appearing on CNBC and talking about the bond market.

在Daniel Ivascyn下，他们已经更换为Cio，Pimco现在plans on moving away from the star system。强调，作为Wall Street Journal当它对Ivascyn的第一次采访中进入其中一个采访时解释说，现在将在团队上。对于PIMCO等大型资产经理，其父母，德国保险公司Allianz，团队方法有很多优势。主要是，人们很讨厌。他们做更多的资金（据报道，据报道，据报道，每年薪水为2亿美元），请留下并开始自己的公司（如Jeffrey Gundlach和tcw组）或失去他们的边缘。从企业风险的角度来看，它更优选拥有品牌名称是呼叫卡的好的，匿名机构。当然，你必须拥有一个品牌来拉开，这是Pimco-Janus面对面的原因是如此迷人。Pimco有品牌但不再有明星，而Janus有褪色的明星，而不是品牌。PIMCO从旗舰PIMCO总回报基金中遭受了约235亿美元的赎回。哈斯的流入是这样的，它仍然可以看出。

So, do star managers add value over time? Obviously the exceptional ones like Gross and Gundlach do. But the evidence for consistent outperformance is less clear. Arecent studyby Jack Trifts, professor of finance at Bryant University, and Gary Porter, associate professor of finance at John Carroll University’s Boler School of Business, suggests not.

TRIFT和PORTER看着股权共同基金经理的职业轨迹，重点关注个人 - 或明星管理者，而不是基金本身。他们所发现的是，尽管在市场表现不佳的明星投资组合管理人员不会持续很长时间，但很少有管理人员一贯击败市场超过十年或以上的市场。

这项研究使一些令人沮丧的阅读。他们的数据集包括由1995年的独奏经理运营的积极管理的股票共同基金。有2,551个基金经理持续了九年或更短的九年，而且只有195年，有十年或更长时间的独一无二。宇宙中只有6.85％的管理人员持续了十年或更长时间;超过三分之三，或76.95％，持续了五年。正如您所期待的那样，那些提前退出的人表现不佳：那些持续不超过一年的经理人的风格调整后0.074％相对于市场。

On a risk-adjusted basis, those fund managers with a tenure of ten years or more did outperform those with shorter spans, but Trifts and Porter found that when measured using the four-factor Carhart model of analysis, which adjusts for style and size, “the ten-plus-year managers actually earned negative average alpha in seven of their first nine years.” In other words, most active managers suck. And, as Trifts and Porter note, their results suggest “that longevity as a mutual fund manager is more related to one’s ability to not underperform one’s peers than to the ability to outperform the market.”

随着赛车告诉我，“有少数经理人在长期的时间内击败了风险调整的市场。那些非常少数甚至之间，而且，坦率地说，这很难判断他们是否击败市场，因为他们真的是特殊的“或者结果是由于随机性。这些数据还表明，伟大的长期经理通常是经理，他们在其职业生涯中出现非常良好，只是平均过。

Of course stocks and bonds are different, and it would be interesting to see such an analysis applied to the stars of the bond markets. Yet the preponderance of evidence that few active managers outperform over time remains a powerful argument in favor of indexing. For Trifts, the most interesting aspect of his research is what it means for aspiring portfolio managers. “I teach business school,” he says. “A lot of these students want to manage money.” But from the findings of this study and others, “perhaps what we should be doing is trying to convince them to do something else, because there is such an incredibly low success rate” in active management, he adds.

A major reason that outsize returns are so hard to achieve in traditional active management has to do with the constrained nature of the mandate and the need to hug a benchmark. I’d wager that most of Trifts’s students who want to get into money management see themselves in the less constrained, and potentially much more lucrative, alternative investment field. The ascent of alternative investments, hedge funds and private equity managers has taken the notion of the star portfolio managers to a whole new level. One where Gross’s $200 million looks almost conservative. Almost.

在推特上遵循Imogen Rose-Smith@imogennyc。