For wealthier investors, keeping track of multimanager investment portfolios takes the kind of skill demonstrated by Donald Trump or Sir Alan Sugar. Not so much the skill they employed in building their respective property and electronics empires, but the insight shown in their versions of the hit television programme The Apprentice .

Assessing the performance of multifarious institutions is not so different from assessing the performance of multi-faceted - and two-faced - reality-show contestants. They are all trying to sell you something (usually themselves), they all claim they can make money (implicitly for themselves), and they all say they want to do the job (ideally by themselves).