The manager beauty contest: Do the figures matter?

This paper investigates persistence in the performance of UK institutional pension fund managers. In particular, it questions to what extent managers succeed in beating their benchmark over longer time periods and, hence, whether ‘winners’ can be identified on the basis of past performance. This paper does not generate the ultimate formula that will lead to the selection of the perfect manager, but it does provide important insights into the length of the period over which managers can be evaluated, the forecasting accuracy that can be achieved and the additional information that can be relied upon to improve this forecasting accuracy.