Inside investment: Money management’s existential crisis

Professional investment managers and their clients may have given themselves an impossible goal of generating superior short-term returns.

They said it couldn’t be done

Is the money management industry – or ought it to be – facing an existential crisis?

An investment strategist at one of the big European banks was asked not long ago on one of the financial wallpaper channels if professional investors had learnt the lessons of 2008-09. “No,” he replied, “they will never be able to learn such lessons because they are chasing returns over a six-month to 12-month period and returns cannot be predicted over such short time horizons.

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