In the beginning, fund managers didn’t worry about competition. In those happier times, the first big collective vehicles aimed at retail investors in the UK bought portfolios of 25 or so stocks, mostly with an income bias (the tastes of British investors have not changed), and typical managers did nothing but maintain the portfolio in “an administrative capacity,” says Nigel Morecraft in Towering Investors: The Origins of Asset Management from 1700 to........

© Bloomberg