Stephen Barber, group managing director and head of communications at Pictet, has slammed research by adviser My Private Banking, which says nearly 80% of equity mutual funds sponsored by banks with large wealth businesses have failed to beat their benchmarks over five years.

According to Barber: "The evaluation is grossly unrepresentative. These are a number of cases where the wrong benchmark is used. Such inconsistencies and the extremely small sample size makes this 'research' paper totally meaningless."