In Essentia’s study, which was released in September, the firm evaluated 76 active, long-only equity portfolio managers over the course of 36 months through March 2022. Focusing on 7 key decision types—“stock picking, entry timing, sizing, scaling in, size adjusting, scaling out, and exit timing”—Essentia measured the impact that each manager’s decisions had on a portfolio to determine whether value was added or subtracted from it, the article details.
A surprise finding in the study is that managers make the wrong decision more often than not; a mere 18% of respondents made decisions that added value to the portfolio more than half the time. The “most-right” manager in the study only had an accuracy rate of 55%.