Burdett: Managers struggle to maintain sector-beating performance

The credit crunch is now more than three years old. The chaos of 2008, the rushed policy responses and bank capital injections and the subsequent cyclical bounce have been followed by regular jolts to investor confidence, not least the one that gripped the last quarter.

It is interesting to pay more attention than normal to trends in fund management over those three years, something our quarterly FundWatch survey provides for. By way of background the survey is fact-based and uses performance analysis, which forms part of our investment process. For reference, all data is from Lipper for IMA sectors and is calculated in total return terms in sterling for periods ending 30 September 2011. One of the key parts of the analysis is a focus on consistency of returns, using a filter to pick out only those funds that are consistently above average in each of ...