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by maria2 1265 days ago
Last time I checked, the “mutual funds don’t beat the market” is kind of a myth perpetuated by S&P Dow Jones Indices to hype their own index products. First of all, what is the S&P 500 if not a handpicked collection of stocks? To say mutual funds don’t beat the S&P 500 is to say that S&P is the best stock picker out there. I find that unlikely. Second, something like 10% of mutual funds do beat the S&P 500 on long time horizons.
1 comments
rofo1 1265 days ago
Where did you find that 10% beat S&P? First of all, that's low %, but I don't think even that is accurate. So you have 1 in 10 chance of identifying who might beat the S&P. Congrats.

Can you share a source for that? As far as I remember, the odds are around 1 in 300 (this is from memory, but that information is from Bogle's books directly). I think that research was done since 1970, but I am not sure.

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maria2 1265 days ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/business/stock-market-ind...

The actual stat they provide is:

> And over a full 20-year period ending last December, fewer than 10 percent of active U.S. stock funds managed to beat their benchmarks.

Still, if it was 1 in 300 I think they would say “fewer than 1% or fewer than 0.5%”. So I’m assume between 9 and 10 percent beat the S&P.

I suggest reading the linked article with the mindset that nearly all of the content comes from S&P directly. It’s basically a market piece. For instance, when they say the mutual funds don’t perform consistently, they use a crazy metric of picking the top 25% performers from one year and seeing how many are in the top 25% next year. Basically their point is that mutual funds won’t beat the S&P every single year, and therefore the S&P is better. But if course, unless you’re only investing for a single year, you should care more about the expected total return. Just my two cents.

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rofo1 1265 days ago
They are talking about 2000-2021; what I mentioned is from 1970 (again, that is from memory, I don't have the book in front of me, at the moment). But almost surely that number is nowhere near 10% that can beat S&P in the last 50 years.

Not a lot of funds even continuously exist for 50 years - most of them closed.

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thekyle 1265 days ago
It is true that about 10% of large cap mutual funds beat the S&P 500 over a 10 year period (see the latest SPIVA study). At 20 years it goes down to about 5% that will beat the S&P 500.

https://imgur.com/saiuwNn

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