Martijn Cremers: In Active Management, It's Not the '90s Anymore

Twenty years is a long time in the investment world. As K.J. Martijn Cremers, Jon Fulkerson and Timothy Riley note in their most recent study, “Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Active Management.”

The professors wanted to revisit the conventional wisdom on active managers, specifically that: 1) average funds underperformed after fees, 2) the performance of the best funds do not persist, and 3) some fund managers are skilled, but few have skill in excess of costs.

They note that a landmark study by Mark Carhart in 1997 did “not support the existence of skilled or informed mutual fund portfolio managers.” That study was released when only 8% of the assets in equity funds were passively managed; today it’s 40%. In addition, the fee paid to actives funds has decreased by about 20% in that time.

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Upon reviewing the past 20 years of research, Cremers, professor of finance at University of Notre Dame, noted that “current academic literature on mutual funds also finds a substantial body of research that disagrees with [the above] conventional wisdom.”

To that point, he cited a 2015 study by Jonathan Berk and Jules van Binsbergen that found the average active fund outperforms an equivalent index fund by 36 basis points per year. He also said a study he did in 2009 found that funds with “high active shares, meaning funds with holdings that greatly differ from their benchmark, tend to outperform their benchmark.”

Cremers and his co-authors concluded that in reviewing the past 20 years of academic literature, the conventional wisdom is wrong, and that studies have shown that “active managers have a variety of skills and tend to make value-added decisions, such that, after accounting for all costs, many actively managed funds appear to generate positive value for investors.”

While Cremers presented these findings during a live-streamed event presentation, “Advantages of Active Management in a Powerful Portfolio,” sponsored by the Active Managers Council, other speakers also showed compelling evidence of the advantage of active managers.

Other Voices

In his presentation, David Lafferty, chief market strategist of Natixis Advisors, discussed myths regarding active managers. “It’s important to understand there are systematic differences between universes of active managers and the indexes that they [compare against],” he said. “These differences largely explain the fortune or misfortune of many of these active managers from period to period.”

Key factors Natixis looked at for this differential include market direction, in which Lafferty noted, the “vast majority of actively managed portfolios hold cash; market cap indexes do not.”