A manager at one of your clients’ favorite funds is retiring or leaving for another fund, and the client insists it’s time to cash out.

Is that the right time to jump ship? Not necessarily.

According to a new Morningstar study, immediately dumping the fund after a manager change is the wrong thing to do.

“We find, on average, there is no change in future performance following a fund-management change,” says Morningstar. “Yet, investors overreach and subsequently pull money from these funds.”

Morningstar’s study, “The Aftermath of Fund Management Change,” aimed to find out if manager change is correlated to future performance, and how investors react to changes, among other things. It monitored the performance of all actively managed U.S. domestic equity and fixed-income funds between January 2003 and December 2016.

The study measures the performance of funds after one or several manager changes over one, three, six, 12 and 36 months. In general it found that investors “tend to overreact” to management changes, especially in funds with the most assets.

Why should investors stop overreacting to managers moving elsewhere? Because the fund industry has tended to do an effective job of succession planning, the study said. Therefore, Morningstar argued. “the fund manager's industry experience has no effect on either returns or growth rates."

The average economic significance of the change was very small. “We found no relationship between any type of management change and future returns,” the study said. “There is zero relationship between a management change on gross excess returns measured in basis points.”

In explaining its findings, Morningstar posited that funds have changed over the last few years and that performance is less dependent on the performance of a superstar manager.

“Funds are run by a team of people, down to their research analyst performing due diligence on a stock or a bond,” the study said.

“These funds also have strong trading processes,” said Madison Sargis, a quantative analyst with Morningstar and one of the authors of the study. “So, it doesn’t really matter who the name at the top is if they are grooming these people throughout the organization to behave similarly,”

A fund’s investors should be patient, Sargis added. “This is really an education moment for advisors. They should say to clients that there is not going to be a change in performance.”

That said, Sargis noted, investors might want to think about taking their money elsewhere if a fund's costs rise under new management.

“If a fund’s expenses go up, then moving to a cheaper option, net the incoming tax bill, may be justified,” Sargis said. “If the expenses do not change, then investors should think long and hard about selling out of the fund. As we all know, the only certainties of investing are costs.”