Ways of dealing with the current uncertainty in the markets are plentiful, but how many managers will be able to sit out the ride?

When the doyen of British investing, Fidelity fund manager Anthony Bolton, came out of retirement in 2010, I asked him how a fund manager's job differed today from when he started as an investment manager in 1979.

After some careful consideration, Bolton answered that fund managers today have to digest much more information than in the past.

Whereas before, fund managers spent most of their time trying to obtain information by trawling through registers, gathering annual reports and chasing executives for interviews, today the majority of time is spent on making sense of the mountain of data thrown at them on a daily basis.

Today, this job is not made any easier by the vast amount of noise in the market, not in the least because, unlike in the past, the noise has been causing significant swings in market prices for more than two years now.

Fund managers do not have the luxury of ignoring it.

If it is not Lehman Brothers, then it is the potential collapse of the euro. If it is not the euro, then it is the fiscal cliff in the United States.

Systemic risks are dominating the markets and are wreaking havoc on many investment models.

Over the past two years, fundamental analysis would not have got you far, and even the most sophisticated hedge funds have thrown up their hands in desperation and returned money to investors - voluntarily.

So what is the solution?

Some managers seek solutions in high-frequency trading.

But the technological arms race in ever-faster computers has already reached a point where exchanges have adopted standardised cord lengths from their servers to managers' on-premises trading computers in order to rule out any unfair latency advantage.

And regulators around the world, including ASIC, are increasingly concerned about the risk attached to high-frequency trading.

Even some high-frequency traders in the US have carefully suggested the sector would benefit from stricter regulation.

Other fund managers remain optimistic and say the current environment provides good opportunities to make use of mis-pricings, relying on the old adage that markets always revert to the mean.

But increasingly the question that seems to matter most is not who has the right model, but who can stay solvent long enough to sit out this period of uncertainty.