Showing posts with label hedge fund indices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hedge fund indices. Show all posts

Thursday, 1 December 2011

Winton's Futures Fund is primus inter pares

David Harding
There has been a lot of comment in the hedge fund industry on the asset gathering of Winton Capital this year. David Harding's firm has attracted inflows of over $7bn in 2011, which equates to over 10% of the whole industry's capital inflows. This is a remarkable market share of the growth for an industry of over 9,000 funds for investors to choose from.

There has been some commentary that the success of such brand-name big managers is down to the dominance of American institutional flows to the industry, and the limited vision of the investment advisors to those funds. There has been less consideration of the investment performance of the winners.

The tables below come from CM Capital Markets, a Madrid based CTA. Their fund is called CapiTrade Systematic Global Futures, and since they put together and distributed this analysis their three year old managed-account-turned-fund must stack up well on CTA performance criteria. And it does.

But so does David Harding's Winton Capital over the period covered (May 2008 to October 2011). It has been well observed that Winton scaled back risk assumption on their funds during the Credit Crunch, and that since then the funds (Futures Fund and Evolution) have been run with lower risk levels (leverage). It is therefore logical in down-years for the strategy that the Winton funds have smaller losing months and more shallow draw-downs than peer funds. But the success in producing returns this year go way beyond the conservation of capital.

Winton Futures Fund has done better than the peer group in several ways this year: 7 out of 10 positive months (versus 3 for the Newedge CTA index),  a worst-monthly-loss in that time of half of the typical loss of competitors, and a positive year to date return when most CTAs have struggled to make money.

Extending the data window back to May 2008 brings BlueCrest's BlueTrend Fund into the frame as a serious competitor on the basis of performance.  Leda Braga. who runs BlueTrend, is proud to state that she has never reduced the risk appetite of the fund. This has enabled BlueTrend to produce higher absolute returns than Winton over the last 40 months, though with a higher level of volatility. If an investor is willing to take the higher volatility of return and risk assumption, then BlueTrend is a viable alternative to Winton Capital 's Futures Fund. But for the more conservative (by risk appetite) investor Winton Futures Fund is primus inter pares.


Post Script of 2nd December:
Thanks to the two managers mentioned in the above article that came forward with amendments to the data given above by CapiTrend. I should reinforce the point that the returns for 2008 in the above table were supposed to be those from May to December of that year. The returns for some leading managers for the whole of 2008 were:

AHL up 29%
BlueTrend up 43%
Millburn Diversified up 22.36%
Winton up 22%


In addition, other data quoted for Millburn in the above tables are not recognised by the Millburn Ridgefield Corporation themselves. BarclayHedge gives the annual return series for the Diversified Fund as 2008 22.36%, 2009 -7.38%, 2010 12.58% and 2011 (to Oct) as -6.75%. 

Apologies to the relevant managers from me for distributing erroneous data. I hope the thrust of the article still applies, and there is a lesson in this about the source of data and the (mis)use of it!

Wednesday, 26 October 2011

Macro Managers Coming Through at Last

One of the disappoinments this year has been the performance of global macro managers. At the stage of half way through the year, it seemed that if a manager in this strategy had ridden the wave of QE2 inspired up-moves in equities and commodities then they gave it back by staying too long at the party, as the effects of monetary stimulus dissipated in May and from that month onwards. Those that lost a little in the 1Q may have made a bit back by mid-year, but there seemed to be too few managers that were able to ride markets in one direction and then the other with enough conviction or timing to make money across the whole of their books.

The pattern seemed to be if you made money early in the year you gave it back later. If a manager had a positive P&L in equities, they lost enough money in FX to be left around flat for the year. To be fair to the macro managers the market action this year, whether in fx or commodities or equities, has oftentimes not been in a pronounced trend for long. So it is that CTAs, the ultimate feeders off markets exhibiting trending behaviour, did not make good money until the last few months. Further, reversals have been sharp and volatility high - which makes it hard to hold onto gains even when they have been chiselled out of recalcitrant markets. The exceptions to the generality amongst global macro traders were those that tend to specialise in fixed income - the likes of Brevan Howard - for whom the trend was their friend for long enough for decent gains to be made by end of July.  

One of things that surprised me at the half way stage in the year was that so few macro managers had made much at all. Some of these big-picture managers tend to have core fixed income books, and others express their views on Chinese growth in the fx markets or in commodities. But they all may be positioned long or short, and they decide their own timing and sizing. So there is a lot of scope for the universe of macro managers to have completely different directional bets in the same market. Those that don't do much in energy, might concentrate on time spreads in softs or run a big book in credit trading. The point is they need not have correlated returns at all - in fact logically the universe of global macro managers should always have the biggest dispersion of returns amongst hedge fund strategy groups, and most of the time it does. By happenstance, taking all these different views and putting on unrelated trades across a wide selection of markets, hardly any macro managers had made good returns by the end of June this year. However the market gyrations of August and September have allowed a different story to be told for the period since.

Only this week Luke Ellis of Man Group was commenting that there was a very wide dispersion of manager returns amongst hedge funds in August. In September there was an historic extreme of dispersion of returns amongst managers running hedge funds. So for observers of, or investors in, hedge funds the returns of August and September become much more about which managers you were in, rather than which strategies you were allocated to. And practically it means that index or industry level returns for hedge funds for those two months start to be quite unrepresentative. We are well used to seeing headlines about "Hedge funds failing to deliver this month/on the year to date" based on index level returns, and sometimes (more usefully in this context) about returns across a hedge fund database being "good" or "bad" or generally different from returns on the underlying markets at an asset class level.

When the YTD numbers are close to zero, the next data point has a big impact on YTD returns. That is what has happened to hedge fund returns this year, and for some global macro funds in particular. The tables shown here are from "Absolute Return" magazine  and pick out amongst US-based managers the best returns produced last month. It is pleasing to see the marked presence of macro managers at the top of the rankings after the year they have had.  

These are good returns of specific managers in the global macro investment strategy. However, today I see that The Greenwich Investable Hedge Fund Indices give the index level returns for macro managers as -0.79% for September and -3.72% for the year so far. My experience of dealing with investors in hedge funds is that they are looking at what their specific hedge fund managers have done for them. There will be nearly no one who has experienced a return from their macro managers of -3.72% in the year to date (for reasons of position sizing and the timing of subscriptions and redemptions, if nothing else). Given the extreme dispersion of returns in September, and that macro managers have the widest dispersion of returns amongst any hedge fund investment strategy I can confidently say that no-one except an index investor has actually got a return of -0.79% from their macro managers last month. The inference is that the returns of the last two months will tell investors a lot about the quality of manager selection amongst their advisors and consultants, and amongst funds of funds. And not just in global macro.



Additional:
(Dec 7th 2011) Reuters posted an article headed "Global macro hedge fund returns fail to impress". The full article is posted here. The article mentions Louis Bacon's Moore Global Investments, Fortress Investment Group, Tudor Investment Corporation, Caxton Associates and Brevan Howard.

Friday, 21 January 2011

Chart of the Day – Funds of Hedge Funds Flat-line in Asset Flows in North America

My Chart of the Day comes from The Eurekahedge Report which looks at 2010 hedge asset flows and investment returns. The chart compares the monthly asset flows to North American hedge funds and funds of hedge funds since the start of 2008. The contrast in flows in the recovery phase is very striking: single manager hedge funds net redemptions stopped four months earlier than net redemptions to funds of funds; and there have been net subscriptions to single manager funds in most months since April 2009, and net subscriptions to funds of funds have flat-lined over the same period.

Monthly asset flows to North American hedge funds vs North American funds of hedge funds

The North American component of the hedge fund story is very constructive at the single manager level. Not only have NAVS recovered well since the Credit Crunch but in doing so last year the Eurekahedge North American Hedge Fund Index was ahead of the S&P 500 until the last month of the year. Over the last three years North American single manager hedge funds produced annualised returns of just over 7 1/2 %, versus 5 1/2 % for the Global Eurekahedge Index. Indeed American hedge funds produced better returns than funds managed from other developed regions in each of the last three years. So American single manager hedge funds have done better in performance terms than those in other regions.

The three year annualised returns of North American funds of funds are negative according to Eurekahedge, just as the MSCI North America had negative returns over the same period (to end November 2010). Further the 3-year annualised standard deviation of returns of funds of funds is the same as that for single manager hedge funds. So that on a three year basis funds of funds have not delivered absolute returns, and the volatility of returns over that period has not been lower than single manager funds (which historically had previously always been the case). So the return-for-risk argument is weak for funds of funds relative to single manager funds in North America.

As a source of capital for the whole hedge fund industry American investing institutions have become dominant. Survey evidence shows some recovery of appetite amongst institutional investors in hedge funds – questions on investment intentions produce a net positive balance from respondents on a consistent basis since the end of 2009, with US investors more positive than investors in other regions. But the "intentions" have turned into net positive flows only for single manager hedge funds in aggregate (though around 30% of funds of hedge funds report net inflows in the second half of last year). There several plausible explanations for the contrast in flows depicted in the chart.

The gap in performance between single manager hedge funds and funds of funds may have got too wide for investing institutions to bear. Historically there were a few years, over the course of decades, in which multi-manager hedge funds out-performed single manager hedge funds. So in those years there was a (relative) pay-off for strategy allocation and avoiding the under-performers and blow-ups – which is for what investors pay funds of funds. It was commercially crucial that funds of funds did that in the key year of 2008, and they didn't, as a whole. It is now many years since funds of funds in aggregate even got near single manager returns.

Given the return records for single manager and multi-manager hedge funds the additional layer of fees in the latter cannot be justified in the minds of institutional investors. Fund of funds' management fees have been falling for more than a decade, reflecting the balance of supply and demand over that time. In contrast single manager fees have held up much better, with the exception of the immediate post Credit Crunch period. Indeed Eurekahedge record that the average management fees for single manager start-ups in 2010 was higher than for 2009's start-ups.

A third plausible explanation for the difference in asset flows to the two hedge fund sectors in North America is the increased accumulated knowledge and experience of the investing institutions there. The model seems to have shifted. For most of the last decade funds of funds were the mechanism for investing institutions to allocate to hedge funds, but a knowledge transfer has taken place. The senior staff at institutions now have a familiarity with hedge fund concepts and can interpret hedge fund data readily. Whilst funds of funds companies can demonstrate advantages in due diligence process, depth of understanding of investment strategies, and risk management and portfolio construction of funds of funds compared to the dedicated resources available to most investing institutions, the latter can now comfortably find these capabilities on an out-sourced basis. External advisors for strategic decision making and tactical monitoring of hedge funds have usurped the role of the dedicated funds of funds. The same tasks are being carried out, but maybe by a combination of a very small dedicated in-house team with input from an external advisor on a fixed fee basis. A number of funds of funds companies may be retained by investing institutions to give a plurality of opinion and form of analysis, for benchmarking, but experienced investing institutions may not feel the need to pay the old fee scales. Plus the marginal increases in allocations to hedge funds by pension plans is increasingly going to direct investing in single manager funds.

In each of these regards the North American part of the industry is in the vanguard. Most of the assets of the hedge fund industry are managed by managers in the United States. For a U.S. investor to visit (and allocate to) an American hedge fund manager is a lot easier than for a Japanese investing institution – hence there will always be a place for funds of funds for Japanese investors in hedge funds. American investing institutions are the largest contributors of capital to the hedge fund industry at the moment, and will be for some time. Given all the above - relative performance, regional strengths, fee structures etcetera - plus the fact that large, branded hedge fund groups are highly likely to be American, is it any wonder that 85% of the global flows into hedge funds are going into American single manager hedge funds? 






To see more postings on multi-manager hedge funds click on "funds of hedge funds" in the LABELS gadget on the lhs of the page.
 

Tuesday, 23 November 2010

Strategy Allocation in Funds of Hedge Funds - IAM as an example

International Asset Management Limited is Investment Manager for Alternative Investment Strategies Limited, a Channel Islands Listed diversified portfolio of hedge funds. Through the Channel Islands Stock Exchange some top level information is made available.

For example, the strategy allocation as at 30 September 2010 was

Long/Short Equity
30.7
Macro
18.4
Credit
11.4
Fixed Income Rel Val
10.9
Event Driven
10.3
Multi-Strategy
9.4
Trend Followers / CTAs
5.3
Cash & Receivables
3.5
Fund of Funds
0.1
Source: International Asset Management Limited

Strategy allocation at a fund of hedge funds at any one time is a function of a range of factors covering the practical and the structural:
forecast returns per strategy, fund, and underlying market;
macro factor forecasts;
correlation and variance forecasts (or at least assumptions of stability);
fund historic performance compared to peer groups and strategy index returns;
benchmark weightings, normal allocation range per strategy;
strategic biases, and tactical shifts; 
cash flows, and liquidity of the underlying funds (notice period for redemption); 
frictional costs (spread on fund dealing, forward pricing, spread on underlying securities, redemption fees, premium or discount on traded funds, commissions);
and illiquid security constraints (side pockets and side cars).

In addition managers have the subjective influences to cope with - there will be anchoring to the selections made previously, both by strategy and by manager. There are relationships with managers to maintain, and not a single hedge fund manager likes receiving redemption notices, even if they are described to the fund manager by the investor as "rebalancing" or "just trimming an overweight". One investor I know told me that when he tried to diversify away from his very large holding in Soros' Quantum Fund by recycling just some of his gains in the fund, Soros told him it was all or none. He could take it all out or leave it all in but could not limit his exposure at the margin.This is where rationality meets a business man overseeing a business, and it is not seen as constructive in any way by the latter.

Still and all, the fund of funds managers have to manage. In former times, when positive fund flows extended to funds of funds as well as single manager hedge funds, the job of strategy/fund allocation was a lot more simple. The new inflows could be directed to the currently preferred funds and those that were being de-emphasised could be diluted down without any need for redemption notices.  That all stopped in mid 2008. Since then strategy allocation in funds of funds has required (for most funds of funds for most of the time) a redemption for every subscription. Given that there was a persistence of net redemptions as a businesss background for funds of funds well into this year it has been very challenging to activelly allocate to strategies and individual hedge funds since.

One of the advantages of the Listed (funds of) hedge funds is that they are closed-ended vehicles: the capital, if not permanent capital, is there for a finite medium-to-long-term period. This does not get over the need to redeem from one fund to subscribe to another, but at least for the Listed funds of hedge funds there has not been a wall of redemptions to cope with. And if market demand allows there may be tranches of new capital raised for quoted vehicles, to mimic the positive allocation/dilution tactic of open ended funds of funds that have positive flows.

The way that International Asset Management (IAM) has used this capacity to allocate to strategies is shown in the following table.


Strategy Allocation at Quarter End through 2010

3Q
2Q
1Q
4Q’09
Long/Short Equity
30.7
27.4
38.2
35.4
Macro
18.4
17.7
16.9
17.2
Credit
11.4
9.5
9.2
8.3
Fixed Income Rel Val
10.9
11.4
8.9
8.2
Event Driven
10.3
11.9
9.5
12.1
Multi-Strategy
9.4
10.3
6.9
6.9
Trend Followers / CTAs
5.3
7.6
10.5
9.5
Cash & Receivables
3.5
4.1
-0.2
2.1
Fund of Funds
0.1
0.1
0.1
0.3














Source: International Asset Management Limited


A couple of strategy shifts are clear from this time series. In early 2010 capital was taken from Event Driven funds and allocated to Long/Short Equity. After the first quarter CTAs and Equity managers were used as sources of capital for additions to weightings in Multi-Strategy, Credit and to raise cash.


Rather like the approach to hedge fund investing taken by the Common Fund in the U.S., it seems that IAM used a core/satellite approach to portfolio construction, as the Top 10 holdings in Alternative Investment Strategies Limited has been very stable over the last year. The funds listed at the latest data point are shown below.

The Top 10 Holdings as at 30 September
Cobalt Offshore
5.82%
IAM Trading Fund
5.25
Claren Road Credit
4.87
SCP Ocean
4.86
Capula Global Relative Value
4.72
Arrowgrass International
4.71
WCG Offshore
4.66
York European Opportunities
4.64
Prologue
4.41
Diamondback
4.40
Source: International Asset Management Limited

The funds are the same as at the start of the year with only one exception (highlighted). The Top 10 funds accounted for 48.34% of the capital at the three-quarter stage.

The Top 10 Holdings of Alternative Investment Strategies Limited as at 31st December 2009
Cobalt Offshore
5.5%
SCP Ocean
4.75
IAM Trading Fund
4.74
Plainfield
4.62
York European Opportunities
4.20
Capula Global Relative Value
4.15
WCG Offshore
4.13
Claren Road Credit
4.11
Diamondback
4.06
Prologue
4.01
Source: International Asset Management Limited

There is a continual battle in reality and in marketing pitches about the relative contribution of the top-down (strategy allocation) and bottom-up (manager selection) in funds of hedge funds. The long list of practical difficulties given here shows that specifically since mid-2008 funds of funds have had less degrees of freedom in both of those regards than they had previously enjoyed, and that though there may be disappointment over the returns from funds of hedge funds over that period, there are also generic reasons why they have been as limited as they have been. There are other reasons for the under-performance relative to hedge fund indices and hedge fund averages, but they can be explored at another time.



Footnote: The net asset value performance of Alternative Investment Strategies since inception in December 1996 to 30 September 2010 is 146.84%, equivalent to an annualised rate of 6.75%.

ADDITIONAL: UBP ON STRATEGY ALLOCATION  (from their Outlook for 2011)
Larry Morgenthal, CIO of Alternative Investments at UBP Asset Management, believes that reports of the demise of hedge funds are premature. He is quite positive about the industry and believes hedge funds remain an attractive proposition: they provide diversification benefits and they have strong alpha generation potential.

With respect to the various hedge fund strategies, Larry Morgenthal goes on to say, "Allocating between hedge fund strategies is in some respects like dating - we have had a great relationship with credit, are having an affair with long-short equity and think that emerging markets could be marriage material, while macro is like an old flame - not large in the picture now but one we expect to get back together with in the future."

ADDITIONAL TWO: Send me some examples of funds of hedge funds strategy allocations (letters) and I will post a range of them here.

Tuesday, 31 August 2010

Best Performing Hedge Fund Strategy in Next 6 Months - Poll Results

For most of this month a poll has been running for visitors to vote for what they see as the best performing strategy over the next six months. The strategy range was taken fron the Dow Jones Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Indices, and the results were, in order of votes (percentage of votes) and YTD return:

CB Arbitrage 0 (0%), 4.92%

Emerging Markets 0 (0%), 2.69%

Equity Market Neutral 2 (7%), -2.95%

Event Driven 7 (25%), 3.43%

Fixed Income Arbitrage 4 (14%), 6.79%

Global Macro 5 (18%), 4.88%

Equity Long/Short 3 (11%), -0.77%

Managed Futures 4 (14%), -1.24%

Multi-Strategy 2 (7%), 2.15%


Although it would be easy to suggest that the poll results reflect only the performance of the first seven months of the year, as three of the top four performing strategies YTD were selected as expected to be the best over the next six months, that is not the whole story. 
It is pleasing to see some contrarianism amongst the readership - managed futures, by now long overdue for some solid absolute returns, attracted more votes than multi-strategy and equity long/short.

As always, even with vox pop forecasting, there is some insight in it. The hedge fund investment strategy most commonly expected to out-perform the others in the next six months is the event-driven category (distressed, risk abitrage and multi-strategy) .  It is no coincidence that that is the strategy that is mentioned by investors in hedge funds when they are asked by marketers and pollsters where they are currently looking for managers. 

Does this mean investors in hedge funds don't believe that the US economy is in the process of double-dipping? The change in prices of distressed securities are negatively correlated with the economic cycle with a lag, and risk abitrage deal volumes are a function of the capital markets cycles.   



Thursday, 26 August 2010

Another Year Another Challenge for Funds of Funds

In 2008 the fund of funds industry had a tough time producing returns for investors because only 30% of hedge funds produced a positive return. For 2009 things were tough for funds of funds as they couldn't get out of the hedge funds that had let them down by making losses in 2008, because of limited liquidity in the funds, suspended redemptions, and sidecars. Further, few of the funds which made money in 2008 made good money in 2009. So if funds of hedge funds stayed loyal to their winners of 2008 it probably cost them in 2009. There was even a reversal of the size effect on hedge fund returns in moving from 2008 to 2009. 

Before looking at hedge fund returns in 2010, and factors that will impact fund of funds returns, let's look at single manager hedge fund returns in 2008 and 2009 from an absolute and relative perspective.

2008 was an absolute disappointment in terms of hedge fund returns- a loss of around 16%. Last year hedge funds produced their best returns since 1997, at up 19%, by the Greenwich Global Hedge Fund Index. And year to date through July, the same hedge fund index has a small positive return (up 1%), which is not good in isolation as an absolute return over seven months. 

The returns from equities put the absolute returns of hedge funds into some context. Using the S&P500 as a proxy for the equity asset class, the hedge fund returns of 2008-9 look very different. The S&P500 was down 38.5% in 2008, the year hedge funds at an index level lost 16% in a liquidity crisis with high volatility and fraud in the industry, and even so 30% of hedge funds were up.

In 2009 the S&P500 was up 23.5% and hedge funds were up 19%, which given the constrained directionality (beta to markets) is as good as it gets for the alternative funds. Over 70% of hedge funds produced positive returns in 2009.  

This year the S&P is down 4.3% at the time of writing, whilst representative indices of hedge funds are up a small amount.  However the context for hedge fund returns in 2010 is even tougher in some regards than the previous two years. To begin with, let's look at the trajectory of the equity market this year. Below is a one year chart of the S&P500.

source:stockcharts.com


The rally of the second half of 2009 actually peaked in the first few weeks of 2010, and thereafter the stock market has been a rollercoaster of epic proportions, meaning a serious of precipitous falls followed by sharp rises. Monthly index level changes of 7-8% have not been unusual since the outbreak of the Credit Crunch, but the sequences have changed: we had a string of big down months in the bear market to the low in March last year, then a series of big up moves in the massive rally of the last three quarters of last year. In 2010 we have had big up and big down moves alternately. Given that managing the net exposure is typically the biggest risk control variable of most hedge fund strategies (bar the market neutral strategies), this year has been amongst the most difficult market direction background I can recall, as the market was aggressively moving one way and then the other by turns.


Persistence of market movement, or propensity to trend, is different from volatility in traded markets. It turns out that the actual volatility of the S&P500 index, as a proxy for global equity markets, has been both unusually low and then high  this year. The chart below shows 30-day historic or actual volatility of the S&P500.

source: Bloomberg LLP

A level above 25% historic volatility (as opposed to traded volatility) has been uncommon in equity markets, except for short periods, and except for the last two years. The shifts in volatility seen this year would probably have hurt more hedge fund strategies than they helped. Pure volatility strategies should have benefited from the April/May shift in volatility, and the delta hedging of CB arbitrage funds should have had a good background in March and after the June peak in volatility . Overall 51% of hedge funds by number had produced positive absolute returns at the half way point of the year. This hurdle was exceeded by 68% of hedge funds at the end of the first quarter of the year, so the year has got progressively tougher as it has gone on - that falling success rate persisted into the end of August

Hedge Fund Returns by Strategy
source:Greenwich Alternative Investments

Returns by strategy are for the most part marginally profitable or loss making this year. As this is the case, differences in index and sub-index construction and scope have produced different outcomes. What one index provider has as a strategy with a positive return, another shows a negative return for.  Lipper's series of hedge fund strategy indices has only two strategies out of 13 given producing positive returns this year.  Greenwich Global Hedge Fund Indices show only three strategies with negative returns in the YTD (out of a total of 15). Both index providers agree that Long/Short Credit and Convertble Bond Arbitrage are amongst the best strategies for returns so far this year.

Looking across other index providers (Dow Jones Credit Suisse, and Hedgefund.net) it looks as if a small majority of hedge fund indices for strategies produced positive returns in the first seven months of the year. This hit-rate for positive returns by strategy in combination with the dispersion of returns within the strategy has some interesting implications. 


Dispersion of Hedge Fund Returns Within Strategies January-July 2010
source: Lipper, a Thomson Reuters company, TASS database

The dispersion of returns within the investment strategy categories of hedge funds is lower this year than last year. However this year the dispersion ranges for each strategy includes a significantly proportion of negative returns. This is a very different outcome from 2009, when the spread of returns by strategy may have been wider than this year, but returns were overwhelmingly positive. 

The read through to funds of hedge funds will be interesting. Another way of looking at the last two calendar years is that positive returns came from CTA and global macro in 2008, and those two strategies significantly lagged the other hedge fund strategies in 2009. So there were significant returns to active strategy allocation/weightings for investors in hedge funds in both years, though the positively contributing strategies were not consistent through time.

This year, given the dispersion of hedge fund returns within strategies, and with a fair amount of funds with losses as well as funds with profits within each strategy, fund of funds relative returns will be impacted much more by manager selection within each strategy silo than we have seen for a while. Strategy allocation will still have a part to play, but the 2010 ranking of returns from funds of funds will be about old style returns - driven from the bottom up.     

Of course all funds of funds claim that manager selection is a key skill. It will be interesting to see if those managers that make a special play of their abilities at manager selection in their client presentations come through with top ranking returns in 2010.