Merry Christmas Mr Scrooge.

There’s a comforting belief in asset management that if you just deliver strong returns, everything else will sort itself out. Distribution will follow. Platforms will come knocking. Flows will arrive on their own.

That belief survives because it feels fair.

But the Corn Man was doing his research and he found this snippet from Daniel Grote in Citywire:

The Artemis story in 2025 doesn’t prove that performance drives flows. It proves something more uncomfortable: performance only works when distribution is already working.

Let's pop this thing open.

For years, fund groups have told themselves the same story.

“If we outperform, the flows will come.”

It’s a nice idea. It’s also about as reliable as waiting for a record label to discover you on SoundCloud.

Plenty of funds outperform every year and never gather assets. Not because the performance isn’t real, but because nothing in the sales funnel changes when the numbers improve.

No platform momentum. No adviser confidence. No internal sales focus. Just better returns sitting quietly in a PDF.

Artemis’ £3.5bn of net inflows in 2025 look, at first glance, like a clean performance story.

Dig one layer deeper and it becomes something else entirely.

Artemis didn’t suddenly invent a new distribution model in 2025. It didn’t launch a viral campaign. It didn’t rewrite its operating model mid-cycle.

What it did have was:

When performance returned, the system absorbed demand instead of choking on it.

That’s not luck. That’s preparation.

This is the part most firms get wrong.

Performance does not:

In fact, performance often exposes weak distribution.

When returns spike, interest increases. Questions follow. Scrutiny intensifies. If the product cannot withstand that scrutiny, the moment passes.

It’s like finally getting invited on stage and realising the microphone isn’t plugged in.

The inflow tables make this painfully clear.

Vanguard. State Street. HSBC. Fidelity. Passive dominates not because it performs best, but because it removes friction from the buying decision.

Passive doesn’t ask to be believed. It doesn’t require a story arc. It doesn’t need a PM video explaining why the market was unfair this quarter.

Active funds are held to a different standard. Performance is just the entry ticket.

Artemis cleared that bar because everything else was already in place.

The Artemis story is not a call to chase performance harder. It’s a warning against neglecting distribution while waiting for performance to save you.

Believing performance alone drives flows is like believing a great movie will succeed without distribution. If nobody can find it, it’s just an expensive indie film with excellent reviews.

Artemis didn’t win because it outperformed.

It won because when it did, nothing got in the way.

Most funds are betting their future on performance alone.

That bet usually fails quietly.

The uncomfortable truth is that distribution is what decides whether performance becomes a success story or a footnote.