The first is the story of the JB Were Emerging Leaders Trust which invested in small and mid cap ASX listed stocks. This fund was well-supported by advisers and investors as it had a clear focus and manager who got runs on the board. Because of its success it grew quickly and a decision was made a number of years ago to - quite rightly - close the fund to new investments.

There were concerns that the fund had got too big and the interests of the company became misaligned with that of the actual people running the fund.

Last year the manager - Steve Black - left Goldman Sachs JB Were and set up what he calls a Mark 2 version of the fund under the Pengana banner. A key characteristic of this fund is that it is capped and once it gets to a certain size no new money will be accepted.

Black says this means that he can stick to his investment style and deliver what he promises to investors. If a fund which specialises in small and mid-cap stocks gets too large it can lose the ability to deliver good returns.

The second story is the Fisher Funds one where the company has changed its mandate almost arbitrarily allowing it to invest in unlisted companies and Top 10 stocks.

It shows how fund managers can change their rules at whim to suit themselves.

I don't doubt that the arguments put up by the company have some validity. What I question - and this has happened many times before - is that someone invests in a fund buying a certain "style". Suddenly without warning the manager says, nope we don't do it that way any more, we're going to do it this way.

Many people are not impressed with the way it has been handled, and secondly the investor suddenly is owning something which they didn't buy.

The manager can say well if you don't like the changes vote with your feet and get out. That doesn't sound like good customer service.

In some ways the change is Fisher Funds being a victim of its own success.

Fisher Funds has been successful raising money, and because it takes big bets in a smallish universe of funds, it was running into a problem of where to put investors money. (We wrote about this a while back).

The answer, in Fisher Funds' view, was to broaden its mandate and go into two areas which can be hard to find value. The large cap end of town is so well-researched that big gains are hard to come by, and the unlisted end is the opposite. There is no research and the manager needs more resources to analyse opportunities.

My view is that if Fisher wanted to make these changes then they should have closed the current fund, keeping its mandate in place and started a new fund.