cute fuzzy bunny
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
I could be wrong but seems to the performance tracking was only for a relatively short period of time a decade or so and included only a single fund.
IIRC, the problem was that with the exception of lynch and millers magellan and legg mason value, no funds had beaten the S&P for longer than ten years. Including funds that didnt make it would seem fruitless.
What about Peter Lynch or Bill Miller before Magellan or Leg Mason, anybody seen a study on their lifetime performance?
I hate to be flip, but if it was any good I doubt we'd be hearing anything BUT how long they'd beaten the market and by how much.
As we know the law of big numbers pretty much puts a cap on open ended mutual funds significantly outperforming the market for long periods of time.
And therein lay the problem. It seems that predicting which funds/sectors/styles/combination of holdings will do well over the next ten years seems implausible. If someone were able to do this, the money would certainly be flowing in their direction. We can see it looking back with 20/20 hindsight. The hard part is seeing it looking forward, knowing when to get in, and knowing when to get out.
The question is do these results prove that stock picking is a fool errand as the efficient market theory people contend,or do they just prove that open managed mutual funds aren't a good investment vehicle?
Honestly...I think both. I think some people that are very well disciplined can pick up bargains and hold them until they're fully valued and then part company with them, picking up others. I think its really hard to do, I think that many situations are so complex that even the best vetting can fail more often than one would like, and while you'll make money I dont know that after 25 years you'd be on the upside.
Buffet's performance may not be repeatable. He bought big long haul growth stocks at good prices and then kept them until they stopped being the top worldwide brand of choice. Once he'd amassed a considerable fortune he could buy atm-like businesses that reliably produced cash. Once he got that far, he could buy and fix businesses with favorable outlooks but some reparable problem.
If this was really doable, where are the thousands of fund managers who, like Lynch and Miller, would be crowing about their results in beating the markets for 10+ years? We should have at LEAST that many.
Instead, we have a bunch of schmucks who want to tell us about the one or two portfolios out of twenty that didnt hit bottom, with a start date of the beginning of the current bull run.