Absolute return investing: The next revolution or just a passing phase?

The fund management industry is in the throes of yet another turn in its turbulent history. The demands of investors and the numbers by which success is measured are changing as the world tries to adapt to today's low-return environment. But these revolutions are not new. In the 1970s and 1980s, institutional clients would allocate substantial assets to investment managers and more or less give them complete freedom to invest. The primary problem for the client was inflation; that was the benchmark managers had to beat, and there were no generally accepted measures by which the underl...