Introduction

Abstract

Investment management is one of the few highly paid professions for which no formal qualification is universally recognized. Yet few people would dismiss the responsibilities of investment managers as simple or trivial. Even evaluating the quality of their work is complex and inexact. Professional investment management is relatively recent and for the first half of the twentieth century was confined to a limited range of investment techniques and instruments. That started to change in the second half of the century: financial instruments have proliferated and become more complex and markets have become more volatile, for example.