What constitutes an absolute returns mandate?

Over the last few months I have been spending a fair bit of time talking absolute returns with some of the best fund managers in the business.

My motive for talking to the likes of Mark Lyttleton at BlackRock and Tim Russell at Cazenove was to probe a number of key themes that have been bugging me for a while, namely what constitutes an absolute returns mandate and how does the manager accomplish it in practice? There is a lot of waffle out there about cash-plus returns and long/short trades but this is all just marketing juju magic for me – for a start all good fund managers should be thinking about cash plus returns otherwise why would I choose to take my money out of cash and stick it in shares (unless of course we have all ...