Jaime Arguello is the head of multimanager and third-party funds at Barclays Wealth, a unit of Barclays PLC. The London wealth manager said he sees opportunities for individual stock selection and manager expertise to gain the upper hand in 2010 against the broad-based market recovery in the second half of 2009.

After a strong across-the-board market recovery in 2009, we see good opportunities for active managers in 2010. Indeed, as stock correlations have decreased from the very high levels reached in 2008, stock picking should play a big role in investment managers' performance. We favor managers expressing conviction to individual stocks, as opposed to tracking market benchmarks.