Beat the market? That's mission improbable

Pointing to US returns data suggesting that, over a 20 year period, 80% of investment managers fail to predict the movement of stock prices, Ellis said the chances of outsmarting thousands of economic analysts and computer models are "surely negative". Ellis, who founded Connecticut-based Greenwich Associates almost 40 years ago, was speaking this week at the 2010 IFP Conference at the Celtic Manor resort in Wales. He laid into past performance data, outlined the dangers of misunderstanding clients' attitudes to risk and spoke of his enduring admiration for Warren Buffett, a man he de...