By failing time and again to beat the markets, they have engineered their own downfall, Keenan believes. Instead of buying into the fancy investment theories peddled by professional fund managers, he predicts that clients will increasingly cut them out of the picture altogether and simply allow their money to track the markets.

It might sound no more sophisticated than throwing darts at the financial pages of the newspapers but passive approaches to money management have proved to be a far more profitable alternative.

Just ask Keenan. He is chief executive of Irish Life Investment Managers, an organisation that has learned a lot of hard lessons over the past decade. Saddled with a patchy record as a money manager, it embraced passive management almost as a last resort when all else failed.

The gamble paid off and, at a time when fund management blue bloods such as Bank of Ireland are haemorrhaging business, Keenan took in more than 1bn in new money in the first half of the year.

Much of the credit goes to the success of index funds, which now account for 45% of the 28.1bn that Irish Life has under management. Not that you would know it from the company's current advertising campaign, featuring that most rare of animals, a bashful fund manager, who is far more reluctant than his wife to be dragged into the limelight that apparently envelops every star stock picker.

The reality is somewhat different, at least if you work for Irish Life. Rather than sticking your neck out by picking the next Ryanair, Anglo Irish Bank or Tullow Oil, your working day is likely to be a lot more hum drum.

Instead of seeking to pack your portfolio full of winning stocks, you would only buy the shares that appear in the main stock market indices. And you buy them in exact proportion to their weighting in the index.

When a stock is added to the index, you buy it.

When it leaves the index, you dump it. It is investment's version of colour by numbers and the surprising thing is that it works.

Take Irish Life's flagship consensus fund which looks at where the competition is putting its money and then goes off and copies them. If other managers have 20% of their money in Irish equities, the consensus fund will give a similar weighting to an Irish index tracker.

The fund grew 12.6% in the year to the end of June and averaged 14.6% annual growth over the previous three years and 9.8% a year over the past decade. These are middleof-the-road numbers for investors who want to play it safe.

But it is better that the returns posted by the average active manager over the same period.

These are they guys who claim to have the skills to beat the markets. But the evidence suggests that, on average, they cannot even beat a fund that seeks to do nothing more than mimic what everybody else is doing.

In private, the active managers concede that the game is up, at least as regards investing in the world's top stock markets.

The New York Stock Exchange, for example, operates so efficiently that all publicly available information is immediately reflected in stock prices. This leaves little or no scope for the active manager to add value.

Instead they will have to scratch around emerging markets to make a living.

So we can expect to hear a lot more about the money to be made in Asian market or from new sci-fi technologies? But even they will admit that these can be little more than an interesting sideline for the serious investor.

So rather than blinking in the limelight, tomorrow's star fund managers may shortly be looking for a change of career.