Joseph Amato, one of the top execs at Neuberger Berman, a US fund manager, admits the firm’s call in 2018 that emerging markets would outperform has stung a little. “That has been painful for us,” he says candidly. But Neuberger employees may have felt the blow from EMs’ collapse (the MSCI Emerging Markets index ended 2018 down nearly 15%) more acutely than others: they own the company.

This May, it will be 10 years since Neuberger extricated itself from the wreckage of Lehman Brothers with a management buyout — and almost 20 since it was first publicly traded in its own right. Today, the employee-owned firm has zero appetite for returning to either model, Amato says.