Skill Versus Luck: Taking the Guessing Out of Equity Fund Selection

Skill Versus Luck: Taking the Guessing Out of Equity Fund Selection

How to move beyond guessing about manager skill with decision-based analytics, not the outcome-based analytics used at present. Skill is the raison d’être for active equity management. Yet precious little is known about manager skill. What is skill? Who has it? How should it be measured? Is a manager’s skill improving, declining, or remaining consistent? Without answers to such fundamental questions, capital allocators have no choice but to rely on inferences, hunches, and guesswork. In Skill Versus Luck , Michael Ervolini explains how to move beyond skill fog with newer analytics developed over the past decade. Unlike conventional analytics that simply rehash fund outcomes, the newer cause-and-effect analytics relate a manager’s decisions to fund excess returns, providing rigorous measures of manager skill. Results from these newer analytics enable capital allocators to understand manager skill for the first time and make more effective allocation decisions. ENDORSEMENTS “By exposing the limits of entrenched industry orthodoxy, Michael Ervolini reframes how we identify skill, offering allocators a disciplined path beyond outcomes toward better decision-making and stronger active management results.” —Corrado Tiralongo, Chief Investment Officer, Canada Life Investment Management “Ervolini reshapes how investors think about performance, offering practical tools to separate true skill from market noise. A powerful framework for leaders navigating uncertainty in global markets.” —Stephen H. Dover, Chief Market Strategist, Head of Franklin Templeton Institute “By clearly explaining both the old and the new ways of assessing manager skill, Michael has provided convincing evidence for why allocators must update their toolkits for selecting equity investment managers to meet the current moment.” —Carrie Green, Director of Public Equity, Tennessee Department of Treasury Michael A. Ervolini has over 45 years of executive experience in institutional asset management. He is the founder and previously the CEO of two fintech companies: Cabot Investment Technology Inc. and Charter Research LLC. He is the author of Managing Equity Portfolios (MIT Press).