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In January 2020, Terry Smith told his investors why Neil Woodford had failed: the star manager changed his game. Five years on, Smith's own Fundsmith letter records the highest turnover in the fund's history and a new taste for momentum — and the way he explains it matches a pattern behavioural researchers have measured in fund managers' own words.

Terry Smith built Fundsmith on a simple discipline: buy good companies and do nothing. Now, five years into trailing the market, he is turning over half his portfolio and paying more attention to momentum. The strategy that made his name is changing. The fee that came with it is not.

The managers running the biggest active funds picked stocks that beat the market in 2025 — and most still lagged their benchmark. A Morningstar do-nothing experiment and a body of academic research explain why active funds underperform even when the picking is good: skilled buying undone by poor selling, the hidden cost of trading, and the incentives that keep managers churning. The UK evidence points the same way.

A new academic study reveals what active fund management really sounds like behind closed doors. King's College London professor Crawford Spence interviewed 28 senior fund managers and found an industry that runs on faith rather than evidence — privately conceding it overcharges and underperforms, and now pivoting to retail investors as institutional clients leave. Here's what they say off the record, and how to stop paying for someone else's faith.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has investors on edge — but does more uncertainty mean it’s time to abandon passive funds in...

Why does asset management move at a snail's pace? A new book claims it's down to the "purposeful inertia" of entrenched interests.