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Bridge over ocean
1 April 2017 Financial Analysts Journal Volume 73, Issue 2

Active Share and the Three Pillars of Active Management: Skill, Conviction, and Opportunity

  1. K.J. Martijn Cremers

This article relates Active Share to the fund manager’s individual stock-picking skill, conviction, and opportunity. I propose a new formula for Active Share that emphasizes that a fund’s Active Share is reduced only through overlapping holdings with its benchmark. I show why and how to adjust the expense ratio for the level of Active Share and the cost of investing in the benchmark. I conclude that Active Share matters for the performance of actively managed funds. Investors should not pay (too) much for low–Active Share funds, which generally underperform. But there is no evidence that high–Active Share funds as a group have underperformed, and patient managers with high Active Share have been quite successful.

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