I find the Collaborative Exchange’s Meet the Managers (MTM) event the most useful fund management conference of the year. Instead of rambling panel discussions moderated by industry insiders, not journalists, MTM gives each manager about half an hour to focus on a topic relevant to their funds.Over time this has become a platform for second-tier managers. The big gorillas, such as Ninety One, Allan Gray and Coronation, host their own events. Old Mutual was there, for example, but it was highlighting its low-profile passive capability — its Smart Beta fund, not its well-established mainline active management capabilities.I was pleased to see that fund managers are still promoting their balanced capabilities. Mazi, one of the rising stars of the second tier, did a competent dog-and-pony show about its balanced and stable funds. I thought giving a manager full discretion over asset allocation and stock selection was old-fashioned. Frank Russell ― which for some reason dropped the Frank and is now simply Russell ― a pioneer of multimanagement, believed in specialisation and maybe it still does.Russell’s argument was that you would rather appoint the best 100m runner, shot putter, and so on than a decathlete, who by nature would be a generalist. In practice there needs to be co-ordination and the asset allocation should be managed by a fund manager, not an actuary or a “fund selector”. I would rather trust an experienced fund manager such as Karl Leinberger, chief investment officer of Coronation, to do asset allocation than an actuary or a quants manager using a black box.I believe there is still art as well as science in asset allocation and stock selection. This could change, of course, as AI keeps developing and the need for human intervention declines.In my years as a trustee of the TML/Avusa pension fund, which ended in 2022, AI was not around, though quants models allowed for smart beta funds, which replicated the inherent bias in portfolios. What looked like “skill” was often simply a bias towards growth shares when growth shares were doing well.It isn’t the job of trustees to second-guess these market trends, bearing in mind that we all have day jobs and most of them have nothing to do with equity or bond markets. So it is best to leave that decision to fund managers. In the end the TML fund was absorbed into the Retirement Online umbrella fund.We offered a well-constructed passive fund with Nedgroup, which had limited take-up despite lower fees. The most popular choice by far was the Willis Towers Watson fund split between a few balanced managers — similar to the Alexforbes Performer fund. This had a much better track record than the diversified fund, in which a dozen managers, or maybe more, all had specialist mandates.Every year at least one of the managers would blow up. The “conductor of the orchestra”, an actuary at Willis Towers Watson, didn’t have day-to-day insight into what these managers were doing.Mark Lovett is the de facto chief investment officer at Stanlib, who managed teams in Europe for Allianz, Ignis and Nordea in London before joining the Standard Bank Group. He said there has been a subtle shift in terminology from balanced to multi-asset over about the past 20 years. This might not mean much to the public, but in the UK balanced funds were equity-centric. There is no equivalent to South Africa’s Regulation 28 to protect clients. Reg 28 sets a maximum exposure of 75% to equities in balanced funds. In periods of poor equity performance fund managers would pat themselves on the back for “only” losing 15% when the equity market fell 20%.As a trustee it is hard to defend negative performance to members. Pension savings are meant to be “safe”. This led to the huge commercial success of the Allan Gray Stable Fund, with a maximum 40% exposure to shares. Previously investors looking for preservation could turn to cash, but that barely keeps up with inflation.They had to turn to opaque guaranteed funds from life assurers. These are extremely profitable for life insurers, who protect themselves from declining markets with devices such as the market value adjustor. In effect the guarantee falls away when markets decline sharply.It took us a long time to get out of the Old Mutual smoothed bonus fund. Half of our contributions went into this. The rest went into the vanilla Old Mutual market-linked balanced portfolio.It was an interesting exercise adding new managers. Allan Gray was added before I joined the board, but we added Investec Asset Management (now Ninety One) in my time. Coronation was brought in to manage the conservative fund.We also brought in a Sharia option. One member split funded between Sharia and the default option. There must be an interesting story behind that.As a people pleaser I didn’t enjoy parting company with managers. It wasn’t very pleasant to interview Peter Brooke a few days after we ended our contract with Old Mutual to move to Coronation. Brooke has taken early retirement and left Mutual in any case, so in retrospect it was probably a good decision.As a board we were conservative in our manager selection. We were guided by Willis Towers Watson, headed by Ant Lester. It is ultimately hard for a board of trustees to go against the advice of their consultants.With hindsight it would have been worthwhile to have exposure to sexier, hotter managers such as 360NE, Mazi possibly, Aeon or Fairtree. I urged the consultants to consider M&G among the more traditional managers, still a manager I might consider in my personal capacity.• Cranston, a veteran financial journalist, is author of ‘The Mavericks’, a new book about South African fund management.