Hi Jason,

Thanks for this write-up. I look forward to the others in the series.

I find the comments made by Thomas Howard of AthenaInvest to be accurate as well. His hypothesis is that a lot of under performance is due to firm structure. In other words, along with AUM growth, you have committee investing, over diversification, low insider ownership, bureaucracy, "risk management", etc. I am being overly simple in conveying his points of view, so if you have not seen his material, I suggest taking a look.

I think that consultants, advisors, investors, whoever get past simple performance attribution analysis and focus more closely on firm structure, investment process and investment philosophy the future winners become much more clear. Unfortunately, finding good investment managers for the long-term (much like equity selection) takes a lot more effort and qualitative thought than running regression analyses... it also requires patience. What too many of us in the industry suffer from is what Buffett coined as the institutional imperative.

Keep up the interesting writing!