My take: Monday
I was only able to join the Monday sessions towards the end of the day so my take from Monday is the Mark Tennant Summary where he said; First, if banks and advisors are now the agent of the client – who is our distributor? Second, if you see long term equity performance around 6 percent (2 % GDP growth, 2 % inflation, 2 % risk premium) can really charge a 2 percent fee? Third, how do we talk about risk in a way that clients understand?
My take: Tuesday
I cannot think about or talk about the Tuesday sessions without mentioning Marvin Zonis, Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and his talk on Wicked Problems (i.e. problems which are difficult or impossible to solve and when trying to solve them you create new wicked problems) – an inspiring start of the day!
In the following session we heard from Daniel Enskat, managing director at Strategic Insight, talk about how some forward thinking asset managers use new routes to gain access to and drive new assets to their funds. One example is Bill Gross who you can follow at Twitter or at Youtube – is this asset management 2.0?
I would also highlight the afternoon session in Stream A where we could listen to Steve Wiltshire (SW1 Consulting) talk about The Seven Deadly Sins of Fund Selection – certainly a clever way to present a number of challenges for the fund selection market.
My take: Wednesday
I guess that Sass, the bar opposite the Grimaldi Forum, had a profitable night on Tuesday as the audience was a bit smaller on Wednesday morning – but those of us who woke up in time had the benefit of listening to Professor Norbert Walter, Chief Economist at Deutsche Bank Group and also listen to the insights from Anatole Kaletsky, Editor-at-Large at The Times of London and Don Phillips, President Fund Research at Morningstar and also an old colleague of me when I was the European Director of Fund Research at Morningstar in early 2000. In a discussion on regulation Don concluded; “There are a lot of investor advocates out there, such as media, advisors and academia and any regulation not recognising that is bad”.