The Future of Fund Management? It’s Vinyl
How traditional asset managers might just have a future in a world of index-tracking passive investing.
Stock picking.
Photographer: Noriko Hayashi/BloombergActive fund managers face an existential crisis. Study after study suggests too few of them beat the benchmarks they track. The flood of money into low-cost index tracking products is evidence that investors are losing faith in their ability to outperform and are increasingly unwilling to pay for that lack of alpha generation. So how will the industry look in a decade’s time?
As the Global Director of Content at the CFA Institute, the body that oversees the coveted Chartered Financial Analyst qualification, Jason Voss has spent the past few years pondering the industry’s fate. I caught up with Voss, who left the group last month to become an independent consultant, by telephone from Sarasota, Florida, earlier this week. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.