It would be remiss of me to conclude without briefly turning to some related but more important research that we are conducting at the Paul Woolley Centre for Capital Market Dysfunctionality. The above discussion points out that the current environment within which active management operates is expensive – we estimate that it reduces returns by about 1.5 per cent p.a.

We also point out that other forms of over-servicing in the industry costs us another 1.5 per cent p.a. Our research suggests that most of these costs could be avoided if rather than competing to outperform each other; investors cooperated with their objective being to maximise the size of the pie in which we would all share equally. We believe that it is this much wider issue that we challenge you to debate, but recognise that it is not in the interest of the majority of your readers to do so.