Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of professional fund selectors from some of the largest wealth management firms across North America agree that active fund management will be essential to investment outperformance in 2024, according to Natixis Investment Managers (Natixis IM). This comes after 61 percent report that the actively managed funds on their platforms outperformed their benchmarks last year, and 67 percent expect the markets to continue favoring active management.
Wealth managers have been working to get the right balance between active and passive investments during the past decade, which saw massive inflows to passively managed index funds across the industry. Yet 46 percent of fund selectors surveyed by Natixis IM attribute the outperformance of passive investments to central bank policy, or 10 years of artificially low interest rates and relatively no inflation. Now, the market factors that elevated passive investing may no longer hold up. Half (50 percent) o