Investment consultancy William M Mercer has made a splash by publicizing an internal performance audit, and in it the firm states it has created the most value against Asia benchmarks. This suggests that in the less liquid or mature equities markets of this region, selecting good fund managers makes a bigger difference than in the United States or Europe.
According to the firmÆs statistics which it acknowledges have not been independently audited, the average value added by Mercer across 45 product categories worldwide was 2.3% per annum - but for Asia Pacific the figure was 4.3%, and for regional equities it hit 5.9%. This contrasts to a mere 0.8% added value in Europe and...
