Are fund managers out of fashion?

Is it all just luck and momentum, or is there some skill involved? The cult of the star fund manager is now so deeply unfashionable that the question seems naïve. All the most recent academic research challenges the notion that good fund performance persists. In doing so, it also dispatches any idea that some active fund managers might have special ability in addition to basic administrative competence. In 1994, Californian academic Mark Carhart had already concluded that any persistence in performance was easily explained by common factors such as expenses, transaction costs and in...