Thrashing the S&P 500 with Market Place Timing

By Wille Smithe


Copyright 2006 Equitrend, Incorporated.

Roughly 75% of fund chiefs don't beat the S&P 500 year in and year out. How can a basket of 500 hundred stocks beat the majority of actively managed mutual funds? The folks that manage these funds are, in most cases, brilliant folks. They're highly educated and have access to the best info and decision supportive systems internationally. So why is it that they don't outperform the S&P 500?

A Fast Test:

Here is a very crude test of management performance: Let's compare the domestic-equity hedge fund performance supplied by Morningstar against the S&P 500 index for one, 3, 5 and ten-year periods, casting backwards from April 30, 1995. The S&P 500 index is a fair comparison for big, domestic firms.

Our results:

Of the 1,097 funds Morningstar covered for the 1 year period, 110 beat the S&P 500, while 987 dropped short. Results ranged from 46.84% to -32.26%, while the S&P 500 attained a 17.44% return.

In the three-year period, the S&P 500 returned 10.54%, while ends up in the funds varied from 29.28% to -15.02% compounded annually. Of the total 609 funds, only 266 beat the S&P 500.

Shifting to the five-year period, of 470 funds, 204 beat the S&P 500. Results went from 27.35% to -8.51%, while the index notched up 12.62%.

At 10 years, only 56 of 262 funds managed to beat the index, and results sundry from 24.77% to -4.06% compounded annually against 14.78% for the S&P 500.

The fact that most funds don't beat the final stock market should not be surprising. Since the majority of cash invested in the stockmarket comes from mutual funds, it'd be mathematically very unlikely for the majority all of these funds to out perform the market.

The implied promise held out to stockholders in actively managed mutual funds is that in exchange for higher costs (relative to index funds), the actively managed fund will deliver superior market performance. There are a host of obstacles to satisfying this implied guarantee.

Some of the issues are:

The larger a mutual fund gets, the more difficult it becomes to deliver outstanding performance.

Although fund size runs counter to performance, fund executives have a strong inducement to let the fund grow as large as possible because the larger the fund gets, the more money the fund executives make.

Most skilled mutual fund managers are hired away by hedge funds, where their fiscal rewards are larger and there are just a few restrictions on investment methods.

By law hedge funds are supposed to be conservative, which in principle limits their likely losses. This conservative stance sometimes limits their ability to use arbitrage, options, or shorting stocks.

Can You Do Better?

Because of the general inflexibility and limitations of most mutual funds, your investment funds isn't properly hedged against market fluctuations. In most cases, if you compared the beta of the equity exposure held in actively managed hedge funds to an equal equity exposure to the S&P 500 index, your reward/risk proportion would be less rewarding than purchasing an identical equity exposure to the S&P 500 index. So , the answer is, you can do better and beat the S & P 500 by utilizing an effective stock market timing system.




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