High Active Share And Patience: A Marriage Made In Heaven

In a 2006 paper, K.J. Martijn Cremers and Antti Petajisto showed that the best-performing fund managers tend to be those whose portfolios differ the most from their benchmark — those who have the highest “active share”. Now Cremers has a new paper out, with another finding: To reap the rewards of a high active share portfolio, you have to be very patient.


The paper, written with Ankur Pareek of Rutgers Business School, is titled, “Patient Capital Outperformance: The Investment Skill of High Active Share Managers Who Trade Infrequently.” Forbes’ John W. Rogers discussed it in a recent column, saying, “Its first sentence clearly lays out the main point: Among high Active Share portfolios, only those with patient investment strategies–holding stocks at least two years–outperform.”

Rogers says the paper “essentially boils down to a few key findings. … Don’t be afraid to deviate from the norm, invest in contrarian stocks in which you have high conviction, and be very patient. Here’s how the paper concluded: ‘Our results thus suggest that Warren Buffett’s investment skill seems generally shared by mutual fund managers in the top Active Share and Fund Duration quintiles.'”

Rogers, himself a top-performing manager, offers three of his highest conviction (active share) stock picks. Among them: Brady Corp. (BRC).