Fund Manager Scorecard

Each year Standard and Poors produce a scorecard of the performance of a regions fund managers against their comparison indices. You can find the raw scorecards here.

I decided to download the one for Australia and tidy up the data a little so it was more presentable. The chart below looks at the number of funds in various categories that have failed to match or beat their benchmark over a 1, 3, 5, and 10 year period. Just a reminder this table shows the number under performing, not the number that beat the index.

As you would expect this is one of those – I think I have seen this movie before type of scenarios. The majority of fund managers failed to match the index in all categories over all time frames. I had a quick glance at the scorecards for the other regions and this pattern repeats itself in all regions. The reasoning for this I think is that all managers are captive to the same narrative fallacies and are caught in the same academic, philosophical and psychological delusion. It is not that markets cannot be beaten because there are clearly well known managers who have beaten their index year after year. But if you based your investment strategy on notions such as the Efficient Market Hypothesis, perceptions that you know the value of  something and plain stupid ideas such as we dont need stops because we are smart and would never buy a company that went down. Then you deserve to made to look like an idiot.

However, there is a wider implication and that is the impact that this sort of massive non performance has on issues such as retirement. As I have said before part of the looming retirement crisis could be solved simply by nationalising all superannuation funds and placing everyone in an index fund. Overnight long term returns would double and fees would be more than halved. But there is also another impact and this one in related to the impact of on performance on the broader confidence in market participants. Is it any wonder that Australians opt for real estate as the prime mechanism of passive wealth creation when they hear about this sort of rip off.