Following the release by the Office for National Statistics of the most popular names for boys and girls, investment provider Hargreaves Lansdown has investigated the most common names for fund managers.

HL found that the names of fund managers are generally no longer popular as baby names. The most common fund manager names are James, Jamie or Jim for a man and Katy, Kate, Catherine or Katherine for a woman.

By contrast, the ONS annual list of baby names released this week found that the most popular names in 2016 were Oliver and Olivia with names such as Noah, Jaxon, Arlo and Luna on the rise - names not normally associated with fund managers, at least not yet. HL says it looks like fund managers may be either “too old or too young” to have fashionable names.

Sarah Coles, personal finance analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “Analysis of the most common fund manager names reveals they are most likely to be called James, David or Jonathan, or a variant of one of these names such as M&G’s Jim Leaviss. Meanwhile, the most popular boys’ baby names are Oliver, Harry, George and Jack. Examining trends over time would seem to indicate that male fund managers are either too young or too old to have fashionable names”

“Female fund managers, meanwhile, are most likely to be called Catherine, Alexandra or Caroline, or a variant thereof. Meanwhile the most fashionable female baby names are Olivia, Amelia, Emily and Isla. The lack of correlation between the two lists seems to come down to the swift turnover of girls’ name fashions, and the relatively small number of female fund managers.”

HL says that because fashions move fast in girls’ names only two of the top 10 baby names entered or re-entered the top 100 before the mid-1990s (Emily and Jessica), and two of them only made the top 100 in the past decade (Isla and Ava). There are few fund managers under the age of twenty five, and the fact that there are fewer than 250 female fund managers in total is also bound to reduce the probability of a match, says the firm.

Male fund managers’ names are statistically more likely to feature in the top 100, because the sample is bigger. Some of last year’s top 10 are too newly fashionable for many fund managers to have them. Oliver first appeared in the top 20 in the early 1990s, while Jacob, Muhammad and Oscar did so in the noughties, and Noah in 2010. Few fund managers have been born so recently, says HL.