This study examines the genre of the monthly or quarterly commentary document in which managers of investment funds report on their funds to investors. The study aims to provide insights about this disclosure genre for business communication practitioners by examining its conventionalized features and the expression of critical thinking in the evaluative judgments of fund managers. A nonpurposive sample of 30 commentaries from investment funds in North America, the United Kingdom, Australasia and South Africa is rater-analyzed in relation to the social genre/cognitive genre model of Bruce (2008a), which is used as a framework to identify the principal characteristics of the genre. The findings suggest that the fund manager commentary is a relatively formulaic genre with a four-move structure that reports the current performance of the fund and presents its investment strategies and their underlying rationale, based on a critical evaluation of the current state of financial or equity markets.
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