Index Funds Beat 99.6% of Managers Over Ten Years

Posted by Charles Hugh Smith

Share on Facebook

Tweet on Twitter

Screen shot 2013-05-16 at 5.51.02 AM

The entire financial management industry is a profit-skimming rentier arrangement.

It may seem uncharitable to note that only .4%–that’s 4/10th of 1%–of mutual fund managers outperform a plain-vanilla S&P 500 index fund over 10 years, but that is being generous: by other measures, it’s an infinitesimal 1/10th of 1%.
 
 
 

According to the folks at the Motley Fool, only ten of the ten thousand actively managed mutual funds available managed to beat the S&P 500 consistently over the course of the past ten years.Consider the following: a quick glance at Yahoo Finance reveals the average expense ratio for growth and income style mutual funds is 1.29%. As a result, approximately $1,883 of every $10,000 invested over the course of ten years will go to the fund company in the form of expenses. Compare that to the Vanguard 500 fund, designed to mirror the S&P 500 index, which boasts an annual expense ratio of only 0.12%, resulting in ten-year compounded expense of $154 for every $10,000 invested.

Frequent contributor B.C. recently screened 24,711 funds on Yahoo Finance’s fund screener and 17,785 funds on the Wall Street Journal’s online screening tool. The results were sobering, to say the least: using a basic set of criteria, the first screen turned up a mere 5 managers who beat the S&P 500 index over five years. Using a slightly different set of criteria, the second screen found 71 funds out of 17,785 outperformed the index over ten years.
 
That’s .4% of managed funds, i.e. an index fund beat 99.6% of all fund managers.
 
…..read more HERE
 
 
 
 
 
Screen shot 2013-05-16 at 5.51.02 AM