My ideas for this book had been milling around for several years, but there is nothing like having surgery during a pandemic to focus your mind. I was fortunate that Steven Gerrard at Agenda read the resulting outline and suggested that it could form the basis for an addition to Agenda's series on the Economics of Big Business – short, accessible introductions to the economics of major business sectors. I cannot thank him enough for giving me the chance to take this on. I am not an economist, so readers certainly do not need to be to gain an understanding of how the fund management industry functions and operates. The vast majority of literature relating to asset managers concerns how they invest, so there seems ample room to explore the array of other functions as well. There is even more room to explore asset management in Europe and the UK when so many books are focused on the United States, either intentionally or as a result of it being the world's largest market for mutual funds.

Writing this book has prompted me to reflect on what has changed, and what hasn’t, over the years since I entered the asset management industry in the late 1990s. This has made the process of writing particularly enjoyable as time for reflection of this kind is less easy when writing about what is new in the industry day-to-day as a journalist. Unusually, my earliest experience in asset management was analysing funds’ charges, which perhaps explains why I have found this part of the industry (how it makes money) just as interesting as its investment role (how it makes money for clients). I have been fortunate that over the intervening years I have been involved in researching and writing about funds’ performance, flows, regulations, distribution, as well as the impact of technology and the development of new products on fund businesses.

Working variously at a research firm, inside an asset manager and as a journalist has given me the chance to hear diverse perspectives on the industry, both from colleagues and from those at other firms across Europe, as well as in the United States and Asia. This has been made more interesting, and sometimes more lively, by often trying to explore issues that asset managers tend to prefer to be left unexplored.