The Crowded Trade

2026 Clearwater Global Asset Manager Report

250 asset management leaders reveal how sameness is diluting competitive advantage

None of the pressures on asset managers today are new. Volatility, fee compression, more demanding clients, a heavier reporting load: the industry has met each one before. What’s changed is that managers are facing them all simultaneously. To confront this mounting pressure, firm after firm is reaching for the same playbook – the same defenses, the same growth bets, the same tools, all with the same certainty.

The Crowded Trade follows a single question across the industry’s whole operating model: when every firm makes the same move, who has the edge?

Based on a survey of 250 senior leaders across asset management, hedge funds, and private credit, the report examines how the industry is attempting to meet this moment. See how growing concern about accuracy and access to the industry’s most important resource, data, is shaping everything from investment to operational decisions.

What’s inside

• The growth bet nearly every firm has already placed
• Why firms rate their own data highly while their teams still work around it
• What separates the firms getting real returns from AI from the ones getting almost none
• The mandate loss leaders see coming, and who they think it lands on
• The few things that still set firms apart, now that the usual ones don’t