The road to convergence

The distinction between investment banks and fund managers is becomingever more blurred. Robert Benson explores the trend and investigates what itmeans for investors

When is a fund manager not a fund manager? When he is a derivatives trader. The structured products and equity derivatives businesses of investment banks have slowly but surely been acting more and more like fund managers. Not content with simply providing the underlying derivatives behind structured products, the derivatives trading houses have increasingly been creating products themselves