Mutual fund managers should move away from benchmarking and back to learning how to make money for investors, says Brian Posner, the new chief executive of Legg Mason unit CAM North America. Speaking to a conference in New York, Posner suggests that mutual funds have "moved away from being investors to being traders. We've sown the seed of our own destruction." Posner says, though, there is hope for mutual funds to regain its footing by becoming long-term research-driven stock pickers, just as hedge funds – which have been grabbing much of the assets and the headlines in the past several years – appear to be also following the path that changes them from performance-driven managers to asset gatherers. He suggests portfolio managers let a little risk into their professional lives and "Step back from indexes and think how to make money."