Boutique managers are becoming increasingly popular, but do they add value? Yes and No, according to van Eyk Research managing director Stephen van Eyk in his presentation to the recent inaugural meeting of the Portfolio Construction Forum Researchers’ Roundtable.

“Size doesn’t matter,” van Eyk said. “There is no correlation between size and returns.” Putting all Australian equity managers on a graph with rolling one-year returns on the Y axis and funds under management on the X axis, no clear pattern of outperformance emerged.

However over the last two years van Eyk noted “there has been a tremendous return for taking ...