Margie Patel has one piece of advice: stop being so greedy. Her admonition is aimed at investors who pumped up the financial bubble with their demand for excessively leveraged, shabbily constructed bonds and who still hunt for outsized yields in the current market.

“The biggest mistake people have made over the past year is looking for an unnaturally high interest rate return in a fundamentally low interest rate world,” says Ms Patel, a managing director at Boston-based Evergreen Investments and one of the most successful fund managers in the US.