Pension funds and their
investment consultants
Tim Jenkinson
Professor of Finance
Director, Private Equity Institute
A mystery
Academic evidence, and industry analysis,over several
decades has shown that active management in mature asset classes adds no value on average
The additional costs outweigh any performance enhancement And while, obviously, some asset managers out-perform each year, returns have been shown to mean-revert
So why do pension funds and other large investors continue to chase “fools gold”?
Or, to put it another way, why are there so many active asset managers? Why are Darwinian forces working so slowly?
Investment consultants
Investment consultants advise many retirement plans, foundations, endowments, and other plan sponsors
On the asset side, the most important services are money manager search/selection and asset allocation development
On the liability side, many ICs are part of organizations that also provide actuarial and liability modelling services
Worldwide, $25 trillion of assets are ‘under advisement’
The industry is concentrated: the top 5 ICs are Hewitt ($4.4 tr), Mercer ($4 tr), Cambridge Associates ($2.5 tr), Russell ($2.4 tr) & Towers
Watson ($2.1 tr)
A recent survey by Pension and Investments found that 94% of plan sponsors employed ICs
Conflicts of interest?
Investment consultants are the key gatekeepers for asset managers, in their attempts to convince plan sponsors to invest – and yet many asset managers, and plan sponsors, seriously doubt their abilities
Arguably, they have an interest in complexity, and in plan
sponsors believing in active management – as it justifies their role in manager selection and increases their fees
So the cost to plan sponsors, and society, may be more via the increased fees of active management than the consultants’ fees per se
Questions
We analyze
① What drives investment consultants’ recommendations
of institutional funds
② What impact these recommendations have on flows
Data
We are the first to use an annual survey of investment consultants recommendations produced by Greenwich Associates
We focus on US active equity products – for which there is the longest consistent data series
Data covers 1999-2011 (survey coverage 91% as of 2011) US equities are probably “more efficient” than other asset classes so may be more difficult to pick winners – but they all continue to try
Recommendations
Consultants are asked to recommend 4-6 asset managers
(Ams) for each investment style (e.g. Large Cap Growth, Large Cap Value, etc.)
Responses are anonymous
Consultants also judge fund managers according to:
1. Soft investment factors, i.e. clear decision making, portfolio manager’s capability, consistent investment philosophy
2. Service factors, i.e. capable relationship professional, useful reports prepared by fund managers, effective presentations to consultants
Performance data
Assets under management and performance data is derived from eVestment, a third-party provider
These are “institutional” products not mutual funds
We limit our analysis to US long-only equity products (we eliminate index funds, hedge funds, REITs and retail funds) We also eliminate products in size/style categories not
covered by the GA survey (i.e. MidCap Growth and Value before 2001)
Data on benchmarks (Russell indexes) is from Datastream and factors (Fama-French-Carhart) from CRSP/Ken French
Final sample
Number of Investment Consultants Number of Recommend ationsNumber of Products Average Product Asset Size
Recommend ed Not Recommend ed Total Recommend ed Not Recommend ed Total 1999 25 459 116 849 965 7,911 560 1,871 2000 36 1398 241 856 1,097 5,624 737 2,140 2001 27 966 230 993 1,223 4,168 828 1,659 2002 32 1434 314 1,266 1,580 2,757 632 1,150 2003 30 1444 357 1,306 1,663 3,244 721 1,382 2004 30 1745 409 1,913 2,322 4,056 1,079 1,709 2005 29 1940 452 1,959 2,411 3,925 994 1,641 2006 28 2107 503 1,930 2,433 4,198 984 1,733 2007 29 2297 526 1,909 2,435 3,836 1,108 1,749 2008 30 2164 557 1,842 2,399 2,611 650 1,138 2009 29 1887 533 1,742 2,275 2,982 655 1,219 2010 27 1608 476 1,672 2,148 3,481 798 1,414 2011 28 1501 454 1,537 1,991 3,549 864 1,490
Large Cap Growth 29 437 90 345 435 6,045 927 2,185 Large Cap Value 29 455 91 315 406 5,610 1,257 2,334 Mid Cap Growth 24 150 38 121 159 2,216 513 958
Mid Cap Value 25 108 29 92 121 2,753 564 1,169 Small Cap Growth 26 160 50 204 254 1,309 483 664
Small Cap Value 27 167 51 191 242 1,519 499 746 Core 23 316 104 491 595 3,147 902 1,332
③
Do consultants add value?
We create equal- and value-weighted portfolio returns of recommended and not recommended products
Returns are gross of asset management fees (evidence from eVestment records indicate that intra-style variation in fees is extremely small; see also Busse et al., 2010)
Recommended product returns are also gross of invesment consultant fees
With these returns we estimate one (CAPM), three (FF) and four (FFC) factor alphas and excess returns over portfolios of selected benchmarks
Avg. Returns Avg. Excess Ret. over Benchmark One Factor Alpha Three Factor Alpha Four Factor Alpha Equally Weighted Recommended Products 7.13% 1.25% 2.43% 1.14% 1.14% (1.40) (2.14)** (2.63)*** (1.42) (1.36) Not Recommended Products 8.13% 2.35% 3.52% 2.00% 2.00% (1.59) (3.19)*** (3.30)*** (2.33)** (2.33)** Recommended - Not Recommended
Products -1.00% -1.10% -1.09% -0.85% -0.86% (2.01)** (-3.03)*** (2.49)** (2.31)** (2.33)** Value Weighted Recommended Products 4.90% 0.96% 0.18% 0.39% 0.39% (0.92) (1.26) (0.22) (0.48) (0.48) Not Recommended Products 5.16% 0.57% 0.55% -0.32% -0.23%
(1.02) (0.73) (0.55) (-0.41) (-0.31) Recommended - Not Recommended
Products
-0.26% 0.40% -0.37% 0.72% 0.62% (-0.20) (0.51) (-0.29) (0.73) (0.68)
Summary and conclusions
Consultants’ recommendations are a function of past fund
performance, but also of other factors (service and investment)
Not merely a return chasing strategy
They have a large and significant effect on flows into (and out of) institutional investment products
But they fail consistently to add value in US equities for plan sponsors
The underperformance of recommended products can be explained by consultants’ tendency to recommend relatively large products
However, even allowing for this constraint (legitimate or not), recommended products still fail consistently to outperform
Why the attention?
Because Investment Consultants are so powerful
Asset managers seem to be extremely skeptical about IC’s abilities but to question them could be very costly
Trustees seem to think of ICs as, to some extent, an insurance against being sued
But ICs have no interest in simplicity – they encourage
trustees in their search for fools’ gold and the costs are borne by the pensioners and other beneficiaries
It is time that the performance of ICs was subject to proper scrutiny – but their reaction to this paper has been to
Passive presumption
Should there be a passive presumption for pension fund trustees?
Only if they can articulate why they believe the active
managers they choose will add value should they pay the additional fees
And they should then subject themselves to careful
More?
Take a look at “Picking Winners? Investment Consultants’ Recommendations of Fund Managers”, by Tim Jenkinson, Howard Jones and Jose Vicente Martinez
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2327042
①
What drives recommendations?
We estimate a Poisson model, with the standard exponential mean parameterization, on pooled yearly data
We estimate the impact of past returns, return volatility, soft investment factors, and service factors
Consultants’ recommendations are partly driven by past fund performance, but also by other factors (service and investment quality factors)
Not merely a return chasing strategy
Indeed, the soft investment factors and service factors are economically much more important
②
Recommendations & flows
We consider two measures: A) $ flows and B) % flows
Bivariate relationship between flows and recommendation changes
Flow-performance regressions confirm that recommendations have a large and significant effect on flows into (and out of) institutional investment products
Product Size
Investment consultants’ recommendations tend to be concentrated on large products
Recommended products are 4 times as large as non-recommended ones (although partly as a result of recommendations attracting assets)
Research shows that funds that manage more assets tend to perform worse (Chen et al, 2004)
The preference for recommending large products may not be entirely free; consultants may be inclined to recommend large products due to liquidity reasons or doubts about the ability of small products to handle a larger pool of assets
We then control for size, and still find that recommended
products tend to underperform, although not significantly (see Table VII)
Changes in recommendations
We also look at the relationship between recommendation changes and product performance
So all these products have been considered appropriate for institutional investors
We identify products that experience a net increase (decrease) in the number of recommendations and follow them for 12 / 24 months
Net increases/decreases indicate whether, on average, a given product is being added/withdrawn from consultants‘ shortlists
We form portfolios and estimate one (CAPM), three (FF) and four (FFC) factor alphas and excess returns over portfolios of selected benchmarks
12 Month Period Following Addition/Deletion
Avg. Returns Avg. Excess Ret. over Benchmark One Factor Alpha Three Factor Alpha Four Factor Alpha Equally Weighted Increase in Number of Recommendations 5.34% 0.62% 2.26% 0.99% 0.94% (0.95) (1.02) (2.31)** (1.25) (1.19) Decrease in Number of Recommendations 6.58% 1.19% 3.55% 1.48% 1.54% (1.20) (2.13)** (2.34)** (1.21) (1.32) Difference -1.24% -0.57% -1.29% -0.49% -0.59% (-0.86) (-0.80) (-0.89) (-0.49) (-0.69) Value Weighted Increase in Number of Recommendations 2.12% -0.35% -0.98% -0.22% -0.30% (0.36) (-0.24) (-0.56) (-0.19) (-0.29) Decrease in Number of Recommendations 4.62% 0.54% 1.63% 0.74% 0.81% (0.90) (0.75) (1.09) (0.67) (0.78) Difference -2.51% -0.89% -2.61% -0.97% -1.12% (-0.83) (-0.54) (-0.88) (-0.50) (-0.65)