Today’s (i.e., Friday, 8/16/13’s, page C1) Wall Street Journal contained an article
(“Mom-and-Pop Pitches Draw Flak,” by James Sterngold) discussing the concern of
some in and around the investment industry about the increasing number of esoteric
investment products being sold to small and medium sized investors. These products, born largely of search for
yield in the wake of what I like to call Ben Bernanke’s War on the Elderly and
a desire to avoid the kinds of market downturns we saw in 2008, include long
and short funds, private equity funds, funds that buy unregistered bond issues,
and a range of investment products limited only by money managers’ imaginations
and ability to sell.
Regular readers can probably guess my reaction to this
proliferation of esoterica in the financial marketplace: What’s the point?
I have long contended that the best strategy for just about
everyone to follow is to hold a balanced portfolio of stock index funds and
bond index funds, with the proportions of each based on one’s long term risk
tolerance rather than one’s perceptions of where the market is going, which are
as likely to be wrong as they are to be right.
(See my 5/8/13 post,ANOTHER OF THOSE TRITE BUT TRUE INVESTING MAXIMS for only my latest, until now, expostulation on this point.) The only
trades one should do in one’s portfolio are an annual rebalancing, which must
be done with nearly religious fervor. It
would also help not to look at one’s investments with any degree of frequency;
doing do can lead to panic or euphoria, both dangerous emotions in
investing. By holding index funds and
religiously rebalancing, one will capture a portion of the stock market’s
upside, avoid a portion of the market’s downside and, in almost all cases, beat
the performance of more “sophisticated” products in any meaningful time
frame. (The size of the portion of the
market’s upside and downside one will avoid depends, of course, on the proportions
of one’s portfolio invested in stocks.)
If one really wants to simplify one’s investment life, one could hold a
balanced index fund, which holds both a bond index and a stock index and does
the rebalancing automatically, though generally in a slightly different manner
than an annual rebalancing.
Why do I make this case for index funds with such fervor and
certainty?
First, it is difficult for anyone to beat “the market” over
any meaningful investment horizon. The
definition of “the market” varies with the asset class in which one is
investing, but virtually every market is represented by an index and there is
an index fund for just about every index.
These percentages vary as rolling ten year periods change, but the
latest I saw is that only 13% of active large cap stock managers beat the
S&P 500 index over the prior ten year period.
Second, while there are managers who outperform their
indices, there are few (See the last paragraph.) who do so after the fees that
actively managed funds charge. For
example, the aforementioned Journal article
talks about a retired physician in Florida who bought the Mainstay Marketfield
Fund, which takes long and short positions on stocks depending on who knows
what criteria. This fund charges
management fees of 1.50%, or 150 basis points.
The Vanguard S&P 500 Index charges 10 basis points on its Admiral
Shares. The spread between index and
active fees is not usually this large, but the spread is always considerable
and acts as a kind of ankle weight on the performance of actively managed
funds.
Third, while there are managers who outperform their indices
even after fees, there are not many of them and the chances of your finding the
manager who will do so over the next five, ten, or more years are
miniscule. Remember, past performance is
not necessarily a good indicator of future performance, so simply picking the
best performers for the last ten years doesn’t work. Things change. This is called “manager risk.” One supposes one could find a broker and/or
investment advisor who is skilled at finding really great managed funds, but
one would have a hard time finding such an advisor who is clairvoyant. And brokers who can find such great managers
will doubtless charge more fees, further reducing the chances of your
outperforming “the market,” as defined by an index fund.
Fifth, these exotic new products will not necessarily
perform as advertised. The same
physician cited in the Journal article
reports that he is not dismayed by the underperformance year to date of his
Mainstay Marketfield Fund of the S&P 500 by about 900 basis points because
“I was happy to
sacrifice optimal performance on the upside for the defensive characteristics.”
There may be something to this; the Mainstay Marketfield was
down only 13% in 2008 while the S&P was down 37%. But then again there may not be anything to
the doctor’s argument; we simply don’t know how the Fund will do in a similar
downturn in the future. And even if
Mainstay does that well on relative basis, not every such exotic fund
will.
We do know how a well run index fund will perform; it will
do as its index does, less fees. And we
also know that we can adopt defensive characteristics by not putting all our
money into a stock index, by balancing out the risks of stocks by holding a
bond index. We further know that we will
force ourselves to buy low and sell high with a portion of our portfolios if we
religiously rebalance. And we can
achieve all this while not paying an active manager 14 times more than we pay
an index “manager.”
A necessary word…
Some have mistaken my enthusiasm for index funds as a
rejection of the work of financial advisors.
This is certainly not my intention.
We who have invested, or do invest, for a living and know what we are
doing tend to underestimate the difficulty for the average person of techniques
such as rebalancing. We also tend not to
be intimidated by talk of markets and the use of jargon by the investment
community. In short, we think it is as
easy for the proverbial “average guy” to invest as it is for us to invest. While this can be the case with just a little
bit of effort and a mastery of some pretty elementary arithmetic, it is usually
not the case that the “average guy” finds this stuff as easy as I and my
colleagues do. And sometimes people
simply need a trusted hand to hold, figuratively of course. If you are an “average guy,” at least as far
as money and investing go and/or you’d feel better working with an expert, by
all means work with a financial advisor.
It would be best, though, to work with a financial advisor who is open
to index and index fund like products.
More importantly, be careful; while there are some good advisors out
there, there are plenty of charlatans in the money business. And one can usually detect such a mountebank
by his or her promises of to deliver “above market returns,” “more yield with
the same or less risk,” or “consistent market beating performance.”
Trust and honesty are far more important characteristics for
a financial advisor than are purported investment skill and knowledge.
Even I work with a financial advisor on a portion of my
portfolio and have been doing so for about the last 25 years. It’s good to have someone with experience
both similar to and different from mine with whom to discuss things. He is smart and honest and does his best to
keep the costs down. I trust him and like him and he
more than tolerates my enthusiasm for index and index like products.
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