Best Ideas: can fund managers beat the market?

LSE Works is a lecture series sponsored by SAGE. In this session, Christopher Polk gave a discussion on the efficiency of the stock market and the perceived success of mutual fund managers. LSE Works highlight the latest insights of LSE’s Research Centres, while offering a discourse on various findings.

Christopher Polk, professor of finance at LSE and Director of the Financial Markets Group, gave his lecture at The Hong Kong Theatre at Clement House to an audience of 164. Established in 1987, the Financial Markets Group Research Centre is now one of the leading centres in Europe for academic research into financial markets.

Following Professor Polk’s discussion, which centred on the ideas presented in the paper ‘Best Ideas’ (Randolph B. Cohen, Christopher Polk, and Bernard Silli), Alan Brown and Luke Chappell gave response. Brown is the Chief Investment Officer at Schroders PLC, and Chappell is Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at BlackRock.

Free to the public, the discussion focused on the potential success of mutual fund managers’ stock picks, or ‘best ideas’, in counteracting recent manager failure to beat the market.

A copy of the ‘Best Ideas’ paper is available from this event.