We observed early this year that the curious process of consulting firms becoming fund of funds’ managers was becoming more common. As Niki Nataranjan acutely observes in her recent piece (http://t.co/d7g683ei) investors are going to find it more and more difficult to distinguish between advisors, managers, and consultants.
The crunch will come in two ways. First of all, in the classic consultant model, performance was something to oversee, not to produce. The two are rather different, and require different skills. Further, it is not clear how these manager-consultants will react to negative performance or negative relative performance.
They will fire themselves?