Bl’s David Cohne on Lessons From Active Managers

Evaluating active managers requires more than looking at past performance. After two years of conversations with portfolio managers on Inside Active, host David Cohne, mutual-fund and active-management analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, steps back to examine what those discussions have taught him about identifying investment skill. He explores why sell discipline can reveal more about a process than the reasons for buying a stock, how factor exposure and market environments can complicate judgments about manager skill, and why common assumptions about fund size don’t always hold up in the data. He also discusses how asset-weighted performance can offer a different view of active-management success and why the opportunity for active managers varies widely across asset classes and benchmarks. He also discusses why combining manager conversations with performance and portfolio data can provide a fuller picture of how an investment process works. Recorded Oct. 29. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.