Active management

Wild market swings have given many active managers a rare respite after a decade-long battle against the rise of passive investing.

The asset manager plans to leverage Precadian’s ActiveShares product, which requires funds to publish an indicative value of its holdings every second.

The results were “not just predicated on expense ratios,” an expert says.

“Just because someone’s charging 1% doesn’t mean you should take them off your list,” an expert says.

As liquidity disappeared amid the coronavirus-sparked mayhem, veteran fixed-income portfolio manager Gemma Wright-Casparius saw opportunities.

The purchase comes as active asset managers feel intensifying pressure to bulk up as they face stiff competition from passive and index-tracking funds.

Many of the executives selected this year say the industry’s future may lie in its sudden change to a fully virtual business model.

Funds advised by Katie Koch, whose firm has about $1.8 trillion under supervision, are beating their benchmarks at an 80% rate in 2020.

With few corners of the fixed-income industry safe from harm, investors’ faith in managers appears to be intact — for now.

“People are just saying, ‘Why should I pay for an active manager when most of them lose to the benchmark anyway?’ This is a big deal,” an expert says.

Even when the market was climbing to records earlier this year, John Miller’s risk appetite exceeded that of some of his peers.

Proponents have long touted the new structure as a way for the industry to compete with mutual funds.

With fewer people investing in active strategies and more options to choose from, competition is extremely fierce.

Emulating traditional advisors, digital advisors are moving in the direction of planning offerings and advisor-client contact (albeit virtual).

Morningstar finds that active managers have left a lot to be desired.

Fund managers may be better equipped to weather the market storm than their passive peers because of their ability to quickly cut risk.

Passive ETFs are often among the first to feel the pain of investors fleeing risky emerging markets for safer assets.

Investment in socially beneficial activities can be worthwhile. But it ignores the question of who decides what is beneficial.

The $180 billion asset manager is moving ahead with plans for actively-managed ETFs that disclose their holdings like mutual funds.

Although roughly 40% of the actively managed industry beat their indexes, the worst-performers eked out an average gain of just 1.07%.