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How Active Managers Can Be More Active

Excess Returns

EXCESS RETURNS ARCHIVE >

Insights for Investment Marketing and Sales Professionals

How Active Managers Can Be More Active | February 2025

A long-term view. Buy and hold. Forever stocks … Almost all active asset managers, when asked about their competitive advantage, will use passive-sounding, undifferentiated language like this. A new issue of Excess Returns considers how active managers can communicate—and act—with greater distinction, vitality and precision.

With best wishes,

Liz Hecht
Founder

Download This Issue (PDF)

In This Issue
The Fullness of Time
Vintage Analysis
When

Alpha Partners is an investment marketing firm specializing in custom research, marketing communications and presentation coaching. Our goal is to create alpha (excess returns) by helping investment firms win, keep and diversify assets under management.

Alpha Partners LLC
435.615.6862

The Fullness of Time

Heading into a meeting with a portfolio manager at a large, well-known investment firm, the marketing communications director gives me an earnest warning: “Whatever you do, don’t ask him about the sell discipline.” Puzzled, I ask “Why not?” Only to be told, “He just really doesn’t like talking about it.”

During an in-depth background interview, I ask another portfolio manager, “What do you mean by ‘long term,’ or ‘over a full market cycle?’” “Oh, you know,” he says, “In the fullness of time.” How biblical, I think. He never did provide a true answer. Thinking about it later, I concluded that he was being dismissive. Or making fun of my question. Or both.

I used to think of “long-term” as a desirable attribute resonant with positive meaning. But weirdly, in the investment world, through lack of clarity and vast overuse, claims of “a long-term perspective” have come to mean almost nothing. Ask investment managers to describe what distinguishes their strategy and virtually every company everywhere all the time will claim “a long-term outlook.” And this is true across asset classes.

New Ways to Measure Active Manager Skill

Learning from experience is one of the most powerful, constructive ways to be active in managing portfolios. Active managers today can improve systematically based on rigorous new measures of manager skill.

In reality, a long-term outlook truly is a competitive advantage. Short-term behaviors create opportunities for long-term investors every single day. And unhealthy public market pressure to perform in the short term is one of the reasons why private markets are becoming increasingly popular as a source of capital.

So how does an investment firm present this genuine competitive advantage without sounding exactly like every other investment firm? And, bigger picture, how do long-term-oriented active managers do a better job of sounding active? Here are several suggestions:

Be precise. Define your investment time horizon and what you mean by “a full market cycle.” Point to average annual portfolio turnover as evidence of a long-term mindset. (There are portfolio management teams claiming a long-term outlook with average annual portfolio turnover of close to 100%.) Note the number and age of long-term holdings and describe them, including case studies showing thoughtful patience when times are tough. Provide a few sector- and security-specific examples demonstrating the opposite of long-term behavior.

Show that you know how to sell. Sometimes it’s easy to detect when a portfolio manager doesn’t know how to sell. Unwillingness to discuss the sell discipline and glib, evasive answers to related questions are one tip-off. Another is hanging a company’s identity on the cliché of long-term investing without any of the precision noted above. In a world increasingly dominated by index funds, passive-sounding “buy-and-hold,” expensive beta-masquerading-as-alpha strategies are more subject to challenge. Even so-called “forever stocks” sometimes need to be sold or trimmed.

Demonstrate learning from experience. A particularly pernicious form of passivity is refusing to learn from experience. Learning from experience is one of the most powerful, constructive ways to be active in managing portfolios. And yet, according to Michael A. Ervolini, many investment managers remain impervious to improvement.

Mr. Ervolini is the founder of Cabot Investment Technology, Inc., a global software company providing analytics to help money managers improve portfolio performance. FactSet bought Cabot in 2021, and until recently Mr. Ervolini served as a distinguished fellow at the company. His book, Managing Equity Portfolios: A Behavioral Approach to Improving Skills and Investment Processes, explores new ways to measure skill versus luck, helping investment managers gain a deeper understanding of their strengths and shortcomings.1

Based on in-depth discussions with more than 1,000 equity professionals, Mr. Ervolini has concluded that the industry is “bogged down in denial … more comfortable rationalizing lackluster results than tackling opportunities for deliberate improvement.” He sees such denial expressed in an unwillingness to even try new metrics designed to help managers “improve while more effectively describing their differentiated value.”2 One such metric is vintage analysis defined in brief here.

According to Mr. Ervolini, here is what denial sounds like:

“We already do that.”

“We’re different. Those analytics don’t fit the way we do things here.”

“That’s interesting, but right now we’re busy [doing something completely unrelated to improving].”

“How do I know I won’t break something that’s already working?”

“It makes total sense, but I can’t get my managers to buy into this sort of stuff.”

Seriously? In an industry driven by performance measurement, these practitioners reject new ways of measuring how to improve performance?

Why actively court change and new ways of getting better when you can continue hiding behind truisms such as “buy and hold?” But hiding is getting harder every day. “Although asset managers have been slow to embrace” needed changes, writes Mr. Ervolini, “their clients, asset owners/allocators, are exhibiting a much more favorable response to integrating new metrics in their decision processes … Among the many benefits derived from the new metrics is that asset owners/allocators are now able to confirm that the way a fund is being managed is consistent with its prospectus and marketing materials.”

The phrase “in the fullness of time,” I have learned, “encapsulates the idea of God’s perfect timing … how He orchestrates events to align with His divine plan.”3 In colloquial terms, “in the fullness of time” means: “Eventually, if you wait long enough.” Yeah, I’m pretty sure that portfolio manager was being dismissive and mocking my question!

Vintage Analysis

Pioneered by Cabot-FactSet, vintage analysis is another way to measure a portfolio manager’s information advantage or access to information not already priced into the market. As shown below, vintage analysis offers a variation of contribution analysis showing contribution to returns based on position age sorted by quintile.

Source: FactSet Research Systems, Inc. Permission provided by FactSet Research Systems, Inc. and Copyright FactSet Research Systems, Inc.

This example demonstrates the information advantage of a fundamental global growth equity fund over the most recent three-year time period. This is a successful fund, having delivered over 150 basis points of relative return annually for the past decade.

The contribution by age is positive (green) for four out of five quintiles with 10 to 55 basis points annually of relative contribution. The fifth or oldest quintile (red) was a drag on the fund, generating negative 134 basis points of relative contribution. The chart provides guidance on when a portfolio manager should start challenging positions.

Results, however, are not always this easy to interpret, sometimes requiring additional metrics evaluating the information advantage by year as well as by sector and factor. Combining information advantage by position age with other new portfolio metrics also can be advantageous. New metrics include rigorous measures of individual skills (buying, selling and sizing) and deep loss evaluation (is there a need for a stop loss?).

A modest but growing number of active fund managers, writes Mr. Ervolini, are using these and other metrics to evaluate the efficacy of selling younger and older positions.4

When

“Timing, we believe, is an art. I will show that timing is really a science.”
— Daniel H. Pink in the Introduction to When

Operating in the investment world, where perfect timing is thought to be unattainable bordering on nonexistent, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing is a joy to read. “To unearth the hidden science of timing,” author Daniel H. Pink and his researchers uncover insights about time and timing based on more than 700 studies in the fields of economics and anesthesiology, anthropology and endocrinology, chronobiology and social psychology.

Read When to learn when it’s best to schedule earnings calls and surgery (in the morning), when to present bad news (before good news) and when to do one’s best work (for most of us, before noon without distractions and with deliberate breaks to enhance productivity). The book also provides inspiring examples of perfect timing among groups working in unison (singing in a choir, rowing crew). A blend of theory with practical advice, When offers invaluable guidance on how to configure our daily lives.

1.For more on Mr. Ervolini’s work, visit skillversusluck.com.

2.“Weak Feedback and Denial Are Killing Active Management: A Slow Death, Perhaps, but One that Is Avoidable,” by Michael A. Ervolini,
The Journal of Portfolio Management, February 2024.

3.BibleAsk.

4.For a more in-depth description of vintage analysis, see The Journal of Portfolio Management article noted in Footnote 2 immediately above.

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Click here for the Excess Returns Archive

April 2025

The Art of Uncertainty

Slashed spending by CEOs. Postponed or canceled construction projects. Jobs being cut and delays in hiring. “The unpredictability of President Trump’s stop-start trade offensive,” The Wall Street Journal noted on April 28, “is paralyzing companies on every front except one―taking an ax to costs.” Where will it all end? No one can know. And that’s why now is a very good time to read a book about the art of uncertainty. Professor David Spiegelhalter helps readers understand how humans have learned to measure, manage and survive the unknown. In addition to key insights about putting uncertainty into numbers, the author provides valuable lessons in successful strategies for communicating uncertainty.

January 2025

The Algebra of Wealth

Income. Compound interest. Investments. Debt. Taxes, Inflation … All play a role in building a profitable life. But so do character traits such as stoicism, focus and making the most of present time. In The Algebra of Wealth, Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur, provides expert advice on how to generate income and turn income into wealth. Based on personal experience and behavioral research, Professor Galloway offers vital insights that transcend the typical personal finance book, covering topics such as the futility of worry, treating expense management as a “rational obsession” and finding one’s true identity through hard work as opposed to pursuing a passion.

October 2024

The Money Trap

In this tale of Shakespearean proportions, Alok Sama describes his experiences working for one of the most prolific and audacious venture investment entities, SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Fund investments include ByteDance, Nvidia, Arm and Alibaba―along with legendary failures such as WeWork and Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX. At some point in his time as president and CFO of SoftBank, the author becomes aware of a plot to discredit him and a colleague―a plot involving surveillance of his family, a smear campaign in the press, bogus legal threats and even a honey trap. While hoping to learn who and why, the reader gets a fascinating crash course in early-stage tech investing.

August 2024

The Coming Wave

The Coming Wave describes how new technologies such as AI and synthetic biology are going to change the world. Not this year or next but over multiple decades. As a co-founder of two AI companies and the current head of AI at Microsoft, the author is well positioned to understand and communicate everything that can go right with the coming tsunami of new technologies―and everything that can go wrong. This book makes a compelling, heartfelt case for “claiming the benefits of the wave without being overwhelmed by its harms.”

February 2024

The Devil Never Sleeps

The devil is the potential for pandemics, climate change disasters, terrorist attacks and massive computer hacks. A leader in crisis management and homeland security, Juliette Kayyem documents in depth the perils of underreacting to the inevitable. By dismissing harbingers of doom as mere noise, countries and companies risk turning emergencies into calamities, local diseases into global pandemics and manageable negative events into existential crises. This book provides invaluable lessons on how to prepare for the devil, how to limit harm when the inevitable crises do occur and how to pivot in time for future disasters.

October 2023

Wealth, War & Wisdom

The reality of war never goes away. “Once every couple of generations,” writes Barton Biggs in Wealth, War & Wisdom, “an epic event occurs that destroys accumulated wealth.” The U.S., Australia and Sweden “have been lucky―so far―but in Europe, the apocalypse has happened in one form or another on a regular, generational basis.” In addition to tracking the fascinating history of the markets during WW II, this book explores two primary enemies of wealth during war: complacency (it couldn’t happen here, not to us) and failure to diversify by country and asset class.

August 2023

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Destined to become a classic of economic history, Edward Chancellor’s book provides an intensively researched compendium of all the economic woes that can result from excessively low interest rates. Starting with the ancient origins of interest, the book moves to the unintended consequences of zero-bound (and even negative) interest rates, and concludes with the impact of ultra-low rates on emerging markets.

Strategies for Selling Active Management

Excess Returns

Monthly insights for investment marketing and sales professionals

November-December 2014

How do true active investment managers sell themselves in a market that has become deeply skeptical regarding claims of active management? This issue of Excess Returns offers advice to active managers seeking differentiation from the crowd of closet indexers.

With best wishes,

Liz Hecht
Founder, Principal and Director of Research

Print a PDF of this newsletter

Volume 4 | Number 10

In This Issue

Benchmark Atheists

Active Share

Ivy Investing

Alpha Partners is an investment marketing firm specializing in research and presentation strategy. Our goal is to create alpha (excess returns) by helping investment firms win, keep and diversify assets under management.

Alpha Partners LLC
435.615.6862

www.alphapartners.com

 

Benchmark Atheists

I vividly remember the stab of dismay I experienced the first time I heard the term "benchmark agnostic." I understood that this was a new way to describe active management, but I could not reconcile the concept of agnosticism (lacking in belief, sitting on the fence) to an activity that requires conviction for success. Since that time, "benchmark agnostic" has become a term of art in the investment industry. It is widely used and most people know what it means.

As a human being, I want badly to believe in active management, to believe that the hard work and analytical powers of my fellow humans can generate excess returns. Sustaining this belief these days, however, has become increasingly difficult. The concept of being "agnostic" — the label many active managers now proudly wear — somehow does not convey the requisite conviction. And the rising popularity of active share as a measure of active management has made it easier to uncover the widespread practice of closet indexing among public equity managers. A study of institutionally focused products by Hewitt Ennis Knupp found that demonstrated skill in active equity has steadily declined since the 1990s to the point where "less than 2% of active equity managers have demonstrated evidence of skill net of fees."1

Less than 2%. That is one mighty depressing number. So what if you are an active manager in today’s increasingly skeptical market? How can you convince prospective investors that your strategy is truly active? Here are some suggestions.

Strategies for Selling Active Management

Tell a differentiated story. If your marketing materials and presentations don’t say anything different, how can you convince investors that you are doing anything different? A lot of investment firms claim to manage portfolios that are different from the benchmark, but based on review of their marketing and client communications, it is impossible to determine what these differences might be.

If you’ve got a concentrated portfolio, flaunt it. I have worked with many portfolio managers over the years who initially did not appreciate the marketing power of a concentrated portfolio. Their marketing materials emphasized "in-depth fundamental research" or "excellence in execution" or "a culture of integrity" — all nice to have but difficult to prove and not necessarily differentiating. According to a 2014 Cambridge Associates study, managing concentrated portfolios or a small number of portfolio positions "implies more conviction in each investment … [helping to] focus a manager’s attention and reduce the potential for complacency with smaller positions."2 And yet many concentrated portfolio managers don’t even mention the number of holdings in their communications — or, if they do mention a concentrated strategy, do not explain and consistently reinforce its merits.

Preempt any misperception that your portfolio may be overly diversified. The market’s appetite for concentrated strategies sometimes leads people to forget that portfolio diversification is still often necessary and desirable. In highly volatile, less efficient markets and asset classes, you may need to remind prospective clients that greater diversification does not equate with closet indexing but with more opportunities and less potential risk of capital loss.

Work harder to mitigate human behavior risk. In addition to closet indexing, one of the biggest enemies of active management is human behavior risk, manifested as the stated desire for active management combined with the inability to tolerate the volatility that comes with it. Given human behavior risk, Hewitt Ennis Knupp has recommended that investors treat high-conviction public investment strategies "as if they were illiquid like private investments, and pledge to resist making portfolio changes mid-stream."

From a sales, marketing and client service perspective, I see investment firms spending a lot of time communicating about how they measure and manage investment risk. But they should spend more time communicating in ways that mitigate human behavior risk.

There are a lot of white papers, studies and seminars providing education on the merits and challenges of long-term investing — worthy activities and events all at one remove from the process of getting and keeping clients. But rarely do I see marketing materials with education embedded in the story — education about when a strategy is likely to underperform and why and the benefits of being a patient client. Even if a firm does cover this information in its sales materials, only infrequently is it reinforced clearly and consistently in client service meetings. I suspect this is because, in the heat of battle while selling directly, some firms are reluctant to shine any light on past performance shortfalls, which then makes it difficult to provide education about performance in a client service context. Such reluctance may result in signing up the wrong kind of clients (the impatient kind) and an inability to keep even the right clients during performance declines.

A very successful portfolio manager I have stayed in touch with over the years once said, "Benchmark agnostic? Hell, I’m not an agnostic. If anything, I am a benchmark atheist." Regardless of what label they choose to use, active managers should consider that this is exactly what the most desirable, loyal clients are really looking for: benchmark atheists.

Active Share

Mercer Investments has incorporated active share into the firm’s analysis of individual managers and entire portfolios while many investment firms now monitor active share for all portfolios. What is active share? It is a measure of the level of active management in a portfolio achieved through (1) holding securities not in the index, (2) not holding securities that are in the index and (3) holding stocks in different weights than the index. A portfolio with 0% active share essentially is a pure clone of the index while a portfolio with 100% active share has no holdings in common with the index.

The term was coined based on work by Martijn Cremers and Antti Petajisto in their August 2009 research paper, "How Active is Your Fund Manager? A New Measure that Predicts Performance."3 Cremers and Petajisto concluded that portfolios with higher active share generated better average returns than their lower active share counterparts. Subsequent studies and articles have revealed important nuances around the interpretation of active share:

•

Small-cap portfolios tend to have significantly higher active share. While 80%+ may indicate true active management among large-cap developed equity managers, Cambridge Associates has observed that "95% may be a better cut-off to determine truly active US small-cap managers."

•

Cambridge also concluded that "combining insight from active share and portfolio concentration with tracking error can help investors identify managers that may be better poised for success, with both a better distribution of outcomes and a better average outcome."

•

Undesirable style and market cap drift can increase active share for the wrong reasons. Fidelity Investments has studied the phenomenon of large-cap managers with high active share derived mainly from investing in out-of-mandate smaller-cap stocks.4

In sum, consider the source of active share. Unlike other predictive measures, active share is relatively easy to understand and already has been widely adopted by the consulting community. Even if investment firms choose not to use active share explicitly in their marketing, they can expect to be asked questions about the level and composition of active share in their portfolios.

Ivy Investing

The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets provides inspiration to those of us who still believe in active management. Written by Mebane T. Faber and Eric W. Richardson of Cambria Investment Management, The Ivy Portfolio profiles successful university endowments such as Yale, which came under fire in the aftermath of the financial crisis for its emphasis on equity-oriented, illiquid asset classes. Yale, however, lived to fight another day. In the 20 years ending June 30, 2013, the Yale endowment generated returns of 13.5% per annum relative to 8.4% per annum for the median Cambridge Associates manager — a result that Yale attributes to "disciplined and diversified asset allocation policies and superior active management results."5

The Ivy Portfolio documents how large endowments have achieved investment success through size, relationships, allocations to alternative assets and superior active management — with advice on where individual investors should (and should not) consider using the same strategies.

The Ivy Portfolio is an interesting and enjoyable read not only for investors but also for sales and marketing professionals who want to learn more about the university endowment market.

1.

"Conviction in Equity Investing," a 2012 research study by Hewitt Ennis Knupp. All references to the views of Hewitt Ennis Knupp in this issue of Excess Returns are based on this study.

2.

"Hallmarks of Successful Active Equity Managers," an April 2014 research study by Kevin Ely of Cambridge Associates. All references to the views of Cambridge Associates in this issue are based on this study.

3.

Martijn Cremers and Antti Petajisto, "How Active Is Your Fund Manager? A New Measure That Predicts Performance," Review of Financial Studies 22, no. 9 (August 2009). This article was followed by "Active Share and Mutual Fund Performance," by Antti Petajisto, Financial Analysts Journal, 69, no. 4 (July/August 2013).

4.

"Active Share: A Misunderstood Measure in Manager Selection," Fidelity Investments, February 2014.

5.

The Yale Endowment 2013 annual report.

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Click here for other issues of Excess Returns.

© 2014 Alpha Partners LLC Alpha Partners LLC
Marketing for Excess Returns®
1062 Oakridge Road South | Park City, UT | 84098

You are receiving this newsletter as a member of the investment community. If you no longer wish to receive it, please respond to this email with “No More Penguins” in the subject line. To subscribe to this newsletter, send an email with your request to info@alphapartners.com. Your privacy is important to us. We will never rent, sell or share any information that you provide.

April 2025

The Art of Uncertainty

Slashed spending by CEOs. Postponed or canceled construction projects. Jobs being cut and delays in hiring. “The unpredictability of President Trump’s stop-start trade offensive,” The Wall Street Journal noted on April 28, “is paralyzing companies on every front except one―taking an ax to costs.” Where will it all end? No one can know. And that’s why now is a very good time to read a book about the art of uncertainty. Professor David Spiegelhalter helps readers understand how humans have learned to measure, manage and survive the unknown. In addition to key insights about putting uncertainty into numbers, the author provides valuable lessons in successful strategies for communicating uncertainty.

January 2025

The Algebra of Wealth

Income. Compound interest. Investments. Debt. Taxes, Inflation … All play a role in building a profitable life. But so do character traits such as stoicism, focus and making the most of present time. In The Algebra of Wealth, Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur, provides expert advice on how to generate income and turn income into wealth. Based on personal experience and behavioral research, Professor Galloway offers vital insights that transcend the typical personal finance book, covering topics such as the futility of worry, treating expense management as a “rational obsession” and finding one’s true identity through hard work as opposed to pursuing a passion.

October 2024

The Money Trap

In this tale of Shakespearean proportions, Alok Sama describes his experiences working for one of the most prolific and audacious venture investment entities, SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Fund investments include ByteDance, Nvidia, Arm and Alibaba―along with legendary failures such as WeWork and Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX. At some point in his time as president and CFO of SoftBank, the author becomes aware of a plot to discredit him and a colleague―a plot involving surveillance of his family, a smear campaign in the press, bogus legal threats and even a honey trap. While hoping to learn who and why, the reader gets a fascinating crash course in early-stage tech investing.

August 2024

The Coming Wave

The Coming Wave describes how new technologies such as AI and synthetic biology are going to change the world. Not this year or next but over multiple decades. As a co-founder of two AI companies and the current head of AI at Microsoft, the author is well positioned to understand and communicate everything that can go right with the coming tsunami of new technologies―and everything that can go wrong. This book makes a compelling, heartfelt case for “claiming the benefits of the wave without being overwhelmed by its harms.”

February 2024

The Devil Never Sleeps

The devil is the potential for pandemics, climate change disasters, terrorist attacks and massive computer hacks. A leader in crisis management and homeland security, Juliette Kayyem documents in depth the perils of underreacting to the inevitable. By dismissing harbingers of doom as mere noise, countries and companies risk turning emergencies into calamities, local diseases into global pandemics and manageable negative events into existential crises. This book provides invaluable lessons on how to prepare for the devil, how to limit harm when the inevitable crises do occur and how to pivot in time for future disasters.

October 2023

Wealth, War & Wisdom

The reality of war never goes away. “Once every couple of generations,” writes Barton Biggs in Wealth, War & Wisdom, “an epic event occurs that destroys accumulated wealth.” The U.S., Australia and Sweden “have been lucky―so far―but in Europe, the apocalypse has happened in one form or another on a regular, generational basis.” In addition to tracking the fascinating history of the markets during WW II, this book explores two primary enemies of wealth during war: complacency (it couldn’t happen here, not to us) and failure to diversify by country and asset class.

August 2023

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Destined to become a classic of economic history, Edward Chancellor’s book provides an intensively researched compendium of all the economic woes that can result from excessively low interest rates. Starting with the ancient origins of interest, the book moves to the unintended consequences of zero-bound (and even negative) interest rates, and concludes with the impact of ultra-low rates on emerging markets.

Benchmark Atheists

Excess Returns

Monthly insights for investment marketing and sales professionals

November-December 2014

How do true active investment managers sell themselves in a market that has become deeply skeptical regarding claims of active management? This issue of Excess Returns offers advice to active managers seeking differentiation from the crowd of closet indexers.

With best wishes,

Liz Hecht
Founder, Principal and Director of Research

Print a PDF of this newsletter

Volume 4 | Number 10

In This Issue

Benchmark Atheists

Active Share

Ivy Investing

Alpha Partners is an investment marketing firm specializing in research and presentation strategy. Our goal is to create alpha (excess returns) by helping investment firms win, keep and diversify assets under management.

Alpha Partners LLC
435.615.6862

www.alphainvestmentmarketing.com

 

Benchmark Atheists

I vividly remember the stab of dismay I experienced the first time I heard the term "benchmark agnostic." I understood that this was a new way to describe active management, but I could not reconcile the concept of agnosticism (lacking in belief, sitting on the fence) to an activity that requires conviction for success. Since that time, "benchmark agnostic" has become a term of art in the investment industry. It is widely used and most people know what it means.

As a human being, I want badly to believe in active management, to believe that the hard work and analytical powers of my fellow humans can generate excess returns. Sustaining this belief these days, however, has become increasingly difficult. The concept of being "agnostic" — the label many active managers now proudly wear — somehow does not convey the requisite conviction. And the rising popularity of active share as a measure of active management has made it easier to uncover the widespread practice of closet indexing among public equity managers. A study of institutionally focused products by Hewitt Ennis Knupp found that demonstrated skill in active equity has steadily declined since the 1990s to the point where "less than 2% of active equity managers have demonstrated evidence of skill net of fees."1

Less than 2%. That is one mighty depressing number. So what if you are an active manager in today’s increasingly skeptical market? How can you convince prospective investors that your strategy is truly active? Here are some suggestions.

Strategies for Selling Active Management

Tell a differentiated story. If your marketing materials and presentations don’t say anything different, how can you convince investors that you are doing anything different? A lot of investment firms claim to manage portfolios that are different from the benchmark, but based on review of their marketing and client communications, it is impossible to determine what these differences might be.

If you’ve got a concentrated portfolio, flaunt it. I have worked with many portfolio managers over the years who initially did not appreciate the marketing power of a concentrated portfolio. Their marketing materials emphasized "in-depth fundamental research" or "excellence in execution" or "a culture of integrity" — all nice to have but difficult to prove and not necessarily differentiating. According to a 2014 Cambridge Associates study, managing concentrated portfolios or a small number of portfolio positions "implies more conviction in each investment … [helping to] focus a manager’s attention and reduce the potential for complacency with smaller positions."2 And yet many concentrated portfolio managers don’t even mention the number of holdings in their communications — or, if they do mention a concentrated strategy, do not explain and consistently reinforce its merits.

Preempt any misperception that your portfolio may be overly diversified. The market’s appetite for concentrated strategies sometimes leads people to forget that portfolio diversification is still often necessary and desirable. In highly volatile, less efficient markets and asset classes, you may need to remind prospective clients that greater diversification does not equate with closet indexing but with more opportunities and less potential risk of capital loss.

Work harder to mitigate human behavior risk. In addition to closet indexing, one of the biggest enemies of active management is human behavior risk, manifested as the stated desire for active management combined with the inability to tolerate the volatility that comes with it. Given human behavior risk, Hewitt Ennis Knupp has recommended that investors treat high-conviction public investment strategies "as if they were illiquid like private investments, and pledge to resist making portfolio changes mid-stream."

From a sales, marketing and client service perspective, I see investment firms spending a lot of time communicating about how they measure and manage investment risk. But they should spend more time communicating in ways that mitigate human behavior risk.

There are a lot of white papers, studies and seminars providing education on the merits and challenges of long-term investing — worthy activities and events all at one remove from the process of getting and keeping clients. But rarely do I see marketing materials with education embedded in the story — education about when a strategy is likely to underperform and why and the benefits of being a patient client. Even if a firm does cover this information in its sales materials, only infrequently is it reinforced clearly and consistently in client service meetings. I suspect this is because, in the heat of battle while selling directly, some firms are reluctant to shine any light on past performance shortfalls, which then makes it difficult to provide education about performance in a client service context. Such reluctance may result in signing up the wrong kind of clients (the impatient kind) and an inability to keep even the right clients during performance declines.

A very successful portfolio manager I have stayed in touch with over the years once said, "Benchmark agnostic? Hell, I’m not an agnostic. If anything, I am a benchmark atheist." Regardless of what label they choose to use, active managers should consider that this is exactly what the most desirable, loyal clients are really looking for: benchmark atheists.

Active Share

Mercer Investments has incorporated active share into the firm’s analysis of individual managers and entire portfolios while many investment firms now monitor active share for all portfolios. What is active share? It is a measure of the level of active management in a portfolio achieved through (1) holding securities not in the index, (2) not holding securities that are in the index and (3) holding stocks in different weights than the index. A portfolio with 0% active share essentially is a pure clone of the index while a portfolio with 100% active share has no holdings in common with the index.

The term was coined based on work by Martijn Cremers and Antti Petajisto in their August 2009 research paper, "How Active is Your Fund Manager? A New Measure that Predicts Performance."3 Cremers and Petajisto concluded that portfolios with higher active share generated better average returns than their lower active share counterparts. Subsequent studies and articles have revealed important nuances around the interpretation of active share:

•

Small-cap portfolios tend to have significantly higher active share. While 80%+ may indicate true active management among large-cap developed equity managers, Cambridge Associates has observed that "95% may be a better cut-off to determine truly active US small-cap managers."

•

Cambridge also concluded that "combining insight from active share and portfolio concentration with tracking error can help investors identify managers that may be better poised for success, with both a better distribution of outcomes and a better average outcome."

•

Undesirable style and market cap drift can increase active share for the wrong reasons. Fidelity Investments has studied the phenomenon of large-cap managers with high active share derived mainly from investing in out-of-mandate smaller-cap stocks.4

In sum, consider the source of active share. Unlike other predictive measures, active share is relatively easy to understand and already has been widely adopted by the consulting community. Even if investment firms choose not to use active share explicitly in their marketing, they can expect to be asked questions about the level and composition of active share in their portfolios.

Ivy Investing

The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets provides inspiration to those of us who still believe in active management. Written by Mebane T. Faber and Eric W. Richardson of Cambria Investment Management, The Ivy Portfolio profiles successful university endowments such as Yale, which came under fire in the aftermath of the financial crisis for its emphasis on equity-oriented, illiquid asset classes. Yale, however, lived to fight another day. In the 20 years ending June 30, 2013, the Yale endowment generated returns of 13.5% per annum relative to 8.4% per annum for the median Cambridge Associates manager — a result that Yale attributes to "disciplined and diversified asset allocation policies and superior active management results."5

The Ivy Portfolio documents how large endowments have achieved investment success through size, relationships, allocations to alternative assets and superior active management — with advice on where individual investors should (and should not) consider using the same strategies.

The Ivy Portfolio is an interesting and enjoyable read not only for investors but also for sales and marketing professionals who want to learn more about the university endowment market.

1.

"Conviction in Equity Investing," a 2012 research study by Hewitt Ennis Knupp. All references to the views of Hewitt Ennis Knupp in this issue of Excess Returns are based on this study.

2.

"Hallmarks of Successful Active Equity Managers," an April 2014 research study by Kevin Ely of Cambridge Associates. All references to the views of Cambridge Associates in this issue are based on this study.

3.

Martijn Cremers and Antti Petajisto, "How Active Is Your Fund Manager? A New Measure That Predicts Performance," Review of Financial Studies 22, no. 9 (August 2009). This article was followed by "Active Share and Mutual Fund Performance," by Antti Petajisto, Financial Analysts Journal, 69, no. 4 (July/August 2013).

4.

"Active Share: A Misunderstood Measure in Manager Selection," Fidelity Investments, February 2014.

5.

The Yale Endowment 2013 annual report.

Questions? Comments? Dissent? Click here.

Click here for other issues of Excess Returns.

© 2014 Alpha Partners LLC Alpha Partners LLC
Marketing for Excess Returns®
1062 Oakridge Road South | Park City, UT | 84098

You are receiving this newsletter as a member of the investment community. If you no longer wish to receive it, please respond to this email with “No More Penguins” in the subject line. To subscribe to this newsletter, send an email with your request to info@alphainvestmentmarketing.com. Your privacy is important to us. We will never rent, sell or share any information that you provide.

April 2025

The Art of Uncertainty

Slashed spending by CEOs. Postponed or canceled construction projects. Jobs being cut and delays in hiring. “The unpredictability of President Trump’s stop-start trade offensive,” The Wall Street Journal noted on April 28, “is paralyzing companies on every front except one―taking an ax to costs.” Where will it all end? No one can know. And that’s why now is a very good time to read a book about the art of uncertainty. Professor David Spiegelhalter helps readers understand how humans have learned to measure, manage and survive the unknown. In addition to key insights about putting uncertainty into numbers, the author provides valuable lessons in successful strategies for communicating uncertainty.

January 2025

The Algebra of Wealth

Income. Compound interest. Investments. Debt. Taxes, Inflation … All play a role in building a profitable life. But so do character traits such as stoicism, focus and making the most of present time. In The Algebra of Wealth, Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur, provides expert advice on how to generate income and turn income into wealth. Based on personal experience and behavioral research, Professor Galloway offers vital insights that transcend the typical personal finance book, covering topics such as the futility of worry, treating expense management as a “rational obsession” and finding one’s true identity through hard work as opposed to pursuing a passion.

October 2024

The Money Trap

In this tale of Shakespearean proportions, Alok Sama describes his experiences working for one of the most prolific and audacious venture investment entities, SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Fund investments include ByteDance, Nvidia, Arm and Alibaba―along with legendary failures such as WeWork and Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX. At some point in his time as president and CFO of SoftBank, the author becomes aware of a plot to discredit him and a colleague―a plot involving surveillance of his family, a smear campaign in the press, bogus legal threats and even a honey trap. While hoping to learn who and why, the reader gets a fascinating crash course in early-stage tech investing.

August 2024

The Coming Wave

The Coming Wave describes how new technologies such as AI and synthetic biology are going to change the world. Not this year or next but over multiple decades. As a co-founder of two AI companies and the current head of AI at Microsoft, the author is well positioned to understand and communicate everything that can go right with the coming tsunami of new technologies―and everything that can go wrong. This book makes a compelling, heartfelt case for “claiming the benefits of the wave without being overwhelmed by its harms.”

February 2024

The Devil Never Sleeps

The devil is the potential for pandemics, climate change disasters, terrorist attacks and massive computer hacks. A leader in crisis management and homeland security, Juliette Kayyem documents in depth the perils of underreacting to the inevitable. By dismissing harbingers of doom as mere noise, countries and companies risk turning emergencies into calamities, local diseases into global pandemics and manageable negative events into existential crises. This book provides invaluable lessons on how to prepare for the devil, how to limit harm when the inevitable crises do occur and how to pivot in time for future disasters.

October 2023

Wealth, War & Wisdom

The reality of war never goes away. “Once every couple of generations,” writes Barton Biggs in Wealth, War & Wisdom, “an epic event occurs that destroys accumulated wealth.” The U.S., Australia and Sweden “have been lucky―so far―but in Europe, the apocalypse has happened in one form or another on a regular, generational basis.” In addition to tracking the fascinating history of the markets during WW II, this book explores two primary enemies of wealth during war: complacency (it couldn’t happen here, not to us) and failure to diversify by country and asset class.

August 2023

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Destined to become a classic of economic history, Edward Chancellor’s book provides an intensively researched compendium of all the economic woes that can result from excessively low interest rates. Starting with the ancient origins of interest, the book moves to the unintended consequences of zero-bound (and even negative) interest rates, and concludes with the impact of ultra-low rates on emerging markets.

A Fresh Look at Investment Philosophy Statements

Excess Returns

Monthly insights for investment marketing and sales professionals

October 2014

It is potentially the most powerful page in any presentation book. It can articulate a firm’s identity in distinctive, memorable terms. It inspires calm fortitude during market upheavals, and it often provides points of intellectual alignment with clients and consultants. This issue of Excess Returns takes a fresh look at one of the most undervalued, misunderstood elements in the investment marketing tool kit: the investment philosophy statement.

With best wishes,

Liz Hecht
Founder, Principal and Director of Research

Print a PDF of this newsletter

Volume 4 | Number 9

In This Issue

Investment Beliefs and Marketing

Beyond Short-Termism

Investment Beliefs, The Book

Alpha Partners is an investment marketing firm specializing in research and presentation strategy. Our goal is to create alpha (excess returns) by helping investment firms win, keep and diversify assets under management.

Alpha Partners LLC
435.615.6862

www.alphapartners.com

Investment Beliefs and Marketing

The investment philosophy statement defines the beliefs that guide investment decisions. It is the first and possibly the most important of “the four Ps” that we’ve all been taught are critical in any institutional-quality presentation: philosophy, process, people and performance. Yet many investment firms still either do not seem to have a philosophy statement or offer up as a “philosophy” a list of truisms lacking in character, substance or distinction. In 2007 I wrote an article, Philosophy for Investment Managers, about the role of the philosophy statement — what it is and is not — for the Art & Science section of our firm’s website. Since that time, much has changed.

The Evolving Role of the Philosophy Statement

I see three new trends that investment company professionals should consider when articulating their beliefs about investing:

1.

Your target audience has beliefs, too. In a review of 2004 marketing literature for investment consulting firms, I found relatively few references to “investment beliefs” or “investment philosophy” — and virtually all of these references related to evaluating an investment manager’s philosophy as opposed to communicating the consulting firm’s own philosophy. Today, prominent investment consulting firms clearly articulate their beliefs about how to invest successfully, and asset owners such as CalPERS and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan also have published carefully considered beliefs about investing.

Familiarity with the beliefs of your audience may confer an advantage during meetings and formal presentations. At the very least, such knowledge may save time. (Thinking about a visit to Timbuktu to flog that active US large-cap equity strategy? A quick check of Timbuktu’s Investment Policy Statement might save you a trip, as Timbuktu does not believe in active management for the most efficient areas of the market.) This new emphasis on beliefs among consultants and asset owners gives investment firms another important way to get to know their audience.

2.

The investment time horizon is increasingly important. Time is the context in which every investment philosophy plays out. According to a dataset of 40 pension funds and asset managers with publicly reported investment beliefs, however, only 6.4% of pension funds and 5% of asset managers address the time horizon when describing their philosophy of investing.1 In my experience, virtually all investment managers across asset classes claim “a long-term view” as a competitive advantage. But what does this really mean (and how big an advantage can it be if everyone else lays claim to the very same advantage)? While the market is filled with practitioners claiming to maintain a long-term discipline, one measure shows the average holding period for stocks declining steadily from 33 months in 1980 to 26 months in 1990 to 14 months in 2000 to just six months in 2010.2

This focus on short-term results might mean that long-term holders have become a bunch of complacent suckers, mere prey marching into the maw of high-frequency traders. Or it might mean that a long-term view has become a more significant competitive advantage, particularly in the current market (as I write this, the Dow is down over 300 points today after being up almost 300 points yesterday). Thoughtful, clearly articulated beliefs about the investment time horizon have become more important in crafting the investment philosophy statement, especially now when markets are so volatile and concern is rising over the tyranny of short-termism.

3.

Asset owner and consultant belief systems often explicitly address Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles. My 2007 article cited the following as an example of a strong philosophy statement: “We believe that sustainable development will be a primary driver of industrial and economic change over the next 25 years … Shareholders will best be served by companies that maximize their financial return by strategically managing their performance in this new economic, social, environmental and ethical context.” More recently, in 2012, Towers Watson stated its belief that “environmental, social and governance factors have material influences on risks and returns, which investors may find difficult to price fairly. This creates an information advantage for those investors who are skilled at pricing these risks accurately.”3

As of this writing, there are 1,300 signatories to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, including asset owners, investment managers and professional service partners. Even if you are meeting with an institutional investor or consultant that is not a signatory as an organization, certain influential individuals within that organization may well be ardent supporters. One of these individuals might ask how an investment firm considers ESG factors in its decision process. Given rising support for Environmental, Social and Governance investment principles, investment firms can increasingly expect questions about their beliefs with respect to ESG investing.

Despite these new developments, much has remained the same. Investment managers still tend to give their beliefs short shrift, stating the obvious (an active equity manager who believes the market is inefficient) while failing to note potentially strong sources of differentiation. When belief statements are robust, they tend to be too long or larded with the uninspiring, often confusing language of academia. Actions, strategies and investment styles still are put forward as beliefs (“We are a value investment manager” is not a belief). Proof linking beliefs to results remains rare. And client review meetings, while long on portfolio characteristics and performance, rarely tie this information back to the belief system clients bought when they hired the manager. All of which adds up to a rich field of marketing opportunity for investment firms that can clearly articulate a differentiated investment philosophy and tie their beliefs back to performance.

Beyond Short-Termism

CalPERS has stated the belief that “a long investment horizon is a responsibility and an advantage.” And in their 2014 Harvard Business Review article, “Focusing Capital on the Long Term,” Dominic Barton and Mark Wiseman propose emphasis on “metrics like 10-year economic value added, R&D efficiency, patent pipelines, multiyear return on capital investments and energy intensity of production … in assessing a company’s performance over the long haul.” Many of my public equity clients, however, who believe their performance should be evaluated over at least a three- to five-year time horizon, have told me that in reality three years is a luxury. A 2013 McKinsey Quarterly survey of 1,000 board members and C-suite executives indicates that while a majority believed that a longer time horizon would positively affect corporate performance, they nonetheless felt pressured to demonstrate strong financial results in two years or less.

Mr. Barton, the global managing director of McKinsey & Company, and Mr. Wiseman, the president and CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), note that “one reason why private equity firms buy publicly traded companies and take them private” is to avoid short-term performance pressure. In “Focusing Capital on the Long Term,” they write: “Research, including an analysis by CPPIB, indicates that over the long term (and after adjustment for leverage and other factors), investing in private equity rather than comparable public securities yields annual aggregate returns that are 1.5% to 2.0% higher, even after substantial fees and carried interest are paid to private equity firms.”

Proposed remedies abound for what Mr. Barton has called “the tyranny of short-termism”: superior voting rights for longer-term holders, compensation plans for company executives tied to long-term performance with penalties for underperformance and boards structured to diminish cronyism, to mention only a few.

Messrs. Barton and Wiseman zero in on the source of the problem and the solution: asset owners need to start acting like owners. At present, they write, “many asset owners will tell you they have a long-term perspective. Yet rarely does this philosophy permeate all the way down to individual investment decisions.” In other words, institutional investors need to start putting their beliefs into action. Or, put more bluntly, it’s time to walk the talk, especially when fiduciary responsibilities of the world’s largest asset owners stretch over generations.

Investment Beliefs, The Book

“I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.”

— Warren Buffett

“I’d compare stock pickers to astrologers, but I don’t want to bad-mouth the astrologers.”

— Burton Malkiel

“We’re passive, but we’re not stupid.”

— Dimensional Fund Advisors’ co-founder David Booth

In 2011, Kees Koedijk and Alfred Slager wrote the book Investment Beliefs: A Positive Approach to Institutional Investing, which I believe will become required reading in our industry. Mr. Koedijk is Professor of Financial Management and Dean of the Tilburg School of Economics and Management, The Netherlands, and Mr. Slager, the former Chief Investment Officer at Stork Pension Fund, is director of CentER Applied Research, Tilburg University. The authors point to beliefs as key to achieving clarity of purpose in a world where volatility is the norm. In such a world, a clear set of investment beliefs — a lighthouse in a stormy sea, to borrow the book’s cover image — becomes critical.

One can read this book page by page or jump around in search of specific information. There are useful summaries and case studies spanning organizations from different countries and industries. I particularly liked the chapters that demonstrate the dispersion of beliefs around topics such as inefficiencies, risk premiums, investment horizon and sustainability. Each of these chapters includes a case study, the theory behind different beliefs and debates to be aware of; the quotes above in the chapter on inefficiencies, for example, dramatize the range of beliefs around active versus passive investing.

1.

Table 4.1 in the book, Investment Beliefs.

2.

The NYSE Factbook. For another view on the symptoms and proposed cures for short-termism, see Robert C. Pozen’s May 2014 article published by The Brookings Institution, “Curbing Short-Termism in Corporate America: Focus on Executive Compensation.”

3.

Towers Watson Investment Beliefs, under “Alpha-related” beliefs.

Questions? Comments? Dissent? Click here.

Click here for other issues of Excess Returns.

© 2014 Alpha Partners LLC Alpha Partners LLC
Marketing for Excess Returns®
1062 Oakridge Road South | Park City, UT | 84098

You are receiving this newsletter as a member of the investment community. If you no longer wish to receive it, please respond to this email with “No More Penguins” in the subject line. To subscribe to this newsletter, send an email with your request to info@alphapartners.com. Your privacy is important to us. We will never rent, sell or share any information that you provide.

April 2025

The Art of Uncertainty

Slashed spending by CEOs. Postponed or canceled construction projects. Jobs being cut and delays in hiring. “The unpredictability of President Trump’s stop-start trade offensive,” The Wall Street Journal noted on April 28, “is paralyzing companies on every front except one―taking an ax to costs.” Where will it all end? No one can know. And that’s why now is a very good time to read a book about the art of uncertainty. Professor David Spiegelhalter helps readers understand how humans have learned to measure, manage and survive the unknown. In addition to key insights about putting uncertainty into numbers, the author provides valuable lessons in successful strategies for communicating uncertainty.

January 2025

The Algebra of Wealth

Income. Compound interest. Investments. Debt. Taxes, Inflation … All play a role in building a profitable life. But so do character traits such as stoicism, focus and making the most of present time. In The Algebra of Wealth, Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur, provides expert advice on how to generate income and turn income into wealth. Based on personal experience and behavioral research, Professor Galloway offers vital insights that transcend the typical personal finance book, covering topics such as the futility of worry, treating expense management as a “rational obsession” and finding one’s true identity through hard work as opposed to pursuing a passion.

October 2024

The Money Trap

In this tale of Shakespearean proportions, Alok Sama describes his experiences working for one of the most prolific and audacious venture investment entities, SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Fund investments include ByteDance, Nvidia, Arm and Alibaba―along with legendary failures such as WeWork and Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX. At some point in his time as president and CFO of SoftBank, the author becomes aware of a plot to discredit him and a colleague―a plot involving surveillance of his family, a smear campaign in the press, bogus legal threats and even a honey trap. While hoping to learn who and why, the reader gets a fascinating crash course in early-stage tech investing.

August 2024

The Coming Wave

The Coming Wave describes how new technologies such as AI and synthetic biology are going to change the world. Not this year or next but over multiple decades. As a co-founder of two AI companies and the current head of AI at Microsoft, the author is well positioned to understand and communicate everything that can go right with the coming tsunami of new technologies―and everything that can go wrong. This book makes a compelling, heartfelt case for “claiming the benefits of the wave without being overwhelmed by its harms.”

February 2024

The Devil Never Sleeps

The devil is the potential for pandemics, climate change disasters, terrorist attacks and massive computer hacks. A leader in crisis management and homeland security, Juliette Kayyem documents in depth the perils of underreacting to the inevitable. By dismissing harbingers of doom as mere noise, countries and companies risk turning emergencies into calamities, local diseases into global pandemics and manageable negative events into existential crises. This book provides invaluable lessons on how to prepare for the devil, how to limit harm when the inevitable crises do occur and how to pivot in time for future disasters.

October 2023

Wealth, War & Wisdom

The reality of war never goes away. “Once every couple of generations,” writes Barton Biggs in Wealth, War & Wisdom, “an epic event occurs that destroys accumulated wealth.” The U.S., Australia and Sweden “have been lucky―so far―but in Europe, the apocalypse has happened in one form or another on a regular, generational basis.” In addition to tracking the fascinating history of the markets during WW II, this book explores two primary enemies of wealth during war: complacency (it couldn’t happen here, not to us) and failure to diversify by country and asset class.

August 2023

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Destined to become a classic of economic history, Edward Chancellor’s book provides an intensively researched compendium of all the economic woes that can result from excessively low interest rates. Starting with the ancient origins of interest, the book moves to the unintended consequences of zero-bound (and even negative) interest rates, and concludes with the impact of ultra-low rates on emerging markets.

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