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2 reasons why Hargreaves Lansdown investors have got it wrong


By Sam Instone - December 27, 2016

Chasing performance

[Estimated time to read: 5 minutes]

Asset management has a problem — in fact, several problems.

What’s good for the fund manager, for the company he or she works for, and for that firm’s shareholders, is not necessarily good for you, the investor.

Two classic examples are in fund size and the range of responsibilities which the fund’s manager has been given.

Facinating evidence shows that a misalignment of interest isn’t good for the results you get. 

Here’s why:

Let’s look at fund size first

Think about it from the point of view of the individual fund manager.

The larger a fund is, the greater the fees the fund will earn, and the higher his or her salary and bonuses are likely to be.

High bonnuses

It also suits the fund management company to have as many assets under management as possible; again, more assets under management means higher fees and, ultimately, bigger profits.

But does a fund’s performance actually improve the larger it becomes?

The evidence suggests that, in most cases, it doesn’t, and that usually in fact the opposite happens.

For example, Harlan Platt, Licheng Cai and Marjorie Platt produced a study in 2015 called The Impact of New Capital on Hedge Fund Returns, for which they analysed the aggregate performance of nine different hedge fund styles between 1994 and 2013.

What they found was that although assets under management greatly increased during the second half of that 20-year period, returns significantly decreased.

Other studies have suggested a similar pattern in mutual fund performance.

Fund size vs fund performance

There have been a number of theories as to why this negative correlation between fund size and performance should exist.

One explanation is that as a fund attracts more and more investors, the manager is presented with more and more money to invest, and the danger is that, in trying to put the cash to work as soon as possible, he or she may purchase stocks that subsequently underperform.

But whatever the reason may be, actively managed funds which have recently seen large inflows are often just the funds to avoid.

So, there are diseconomies of scale in asset management, but there are also diseconomies of scope.

A new study of US fund managers between 1997 and 2015 by Richard Evans and Marc Lipson from the University of Virginia and Javier Gil-Bazo of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, called Diseconomies of Scope and Mutual Fund Performance, concluded the following:

“We find that fund alphas are negatively related to measures of the scope of manager responsibilities.

"Results suggest that better performing managers experience increases in scope that eliminate outperformance. In these tests we also find that worse performing managers experience scope reductions that improve performance to a degree that offsets underperformance.”

There’s actually a name for this phenomenon — the Peter Principle, a formula developed in 1969 by a Canadian academic called Laurence Peter.

An expert in hierarchies, Peter showed how managers tend to be promoted up to the point at which they become incompetent.

In other words, organisations test the abilities of their employees until they are found wanting.

Many of us will have seen, in our own careers, how employers often pile so many tasks on their most talented employees that they end up becoming less effective.

Again, it’s easy to see how this happens in the context of the fund management industry.

A fund house naturally wants to give more responsibility to a manager who appears to have shown skill in managing a smaller fund, in order to attract more assets and to boost profits.

The manager also wants more responsibility because, inevitably, it comes with greater financial rewards.

But, all too often, whatever outperformance that manager has demonstrated in the past is effectively arbitraged away by the fact that they have too many distractions or simply too much to do.

too much work

Ironically, these over-promoted managers are just the fund managers who tend to get written about in the financial press.

They’re often referred to as emerging stars, whose early promise hints at a glittering career ahead.

Consequently, investors are attracted towards those managers and, more often than not, end up with disappointing performance.

Conversely, fund managers who have demonstrated incompetence at a certain level, and are then relieved of some of their responsibilities, may go on to outperform!

So, what are the lessons to learn?

First, the fact that a fund is very large is no reason at all to invest in it; indeed it’s more likely to be a reason to avoid it.

Secondly, chasing talent is as bad an idea as chasing performance.

Just because a particular manager seems to have had success early in their career doesn’t mean they’ll continue in the same vein.

In fact, it only makes it more likely that their returns will revert to the mean.

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