the below is one of my favourite hobby horses, so be forwwarned!

Active returns = skill +/- luck +/- risk +/- factor/style

risk can be broken into many subsets, it could be argued that factor/style is one of them. maybe i am missing some variables as well.

how to measure this for a fund manager given the poor disclosure on attribution?. i can assure that the retail consultants, morning star, lonsec. zenith et al get attribution. so do the institutional consultants such as jana and frontier. it can only be guessed at by the retail punter but there are some hints. i would also add assessing your own performance using this framework is helpful.

of course you can make (possibly a courageous) assumption that everything but skill sums to zero in the long term ie 10 years, but the time frame is variable.

i am contemplating writing about this at length, but maybe the community doesnt need another of my esoteric pieces, :)