Research over the last 50+ years has questioned the ability of the average active manager to add value, as well as consistency of active manager performance over time. This does not deny the possibility that some active managers might outperform over reasonable periods of time - however there is little evidence to suggest that professional “active manager pickers” have great success in identifying the better performing managers.

The focus of these two papers is on determining ways to identify better performing funds. The first pape...