slater growth fund

Is it struggling? Showing as 6th from 260 over 1 year, not so hot over 1 month but that's not a realistic term to measure performance imho.

TheTracker wrote: »

Have you considered the possibility that performance across managers/funds is largely random and that the dice have rolled differently recently? Perhaps, as Ryan F inferred, historical performance was more down to asset class performance rather than the manager's ability to read tea leaves.

Its not simply either asset class performance or ability to read tea leaves. The problem is how do you define an "asset class". You could regard global equity as a single asset class, and you see everything as random. You look closer and see that particular subsets of that asset class (eg EM, Asia Pac) have provided higher performance over extended time periods long enough to be useful to investors.

OK lets go down to a particular geography - UK equity. Again look closer and you have sub classes - eg based on company size or %yield. Some have consistently performed better than average over extended time periods. You get other more subjective sub-classes such as recovery situations, mined very successfully over 25 years by Antony Bolton with Fidelity Special Situations.

So yes I would agree that asset class is far more important than a fund manager's tea leaves, but that asset class could be a reasonably well characterised small subset of the global share universe and only covered by a few, possibly one, fund managers.

So it may be the case that the slater growth fund by the use of a consistent strategy has performed consistently well without relying on tasseography. No guarantee that the strategy will perform well in the future, but not due to pure chance either.