Pay less to get more

In the uncertain and volatile world of financial investments, investment cost reduction is the one strategy that is most likely to improve the future value and investment performance of your bond and stock portfolio, while reducing your investment risk. When you drive your investment costs down to the bare bones minimum, you will simplify your personal finances. When you reduce you costs, you will also stop feeding the purveyors of bogus financial strategies who feed off your assets. If you are not willing to pay, they will go after someone else. 

Many individual investors hope that, if they pay higher investment fees, they will get higher investment returns. Unfortunately, for the average investor the opposite tends to be true – particularly after investment costs and capital gains taxes are taken into account.

Over the long-term, passive investment strategies focused on very broadly diversified index funds tend to yield gross portfolio returns equaling the gross return of the broad securities markets. In addition, if these investment strategies are also highly cost-effective and tax-conscious, then net long-term portfolio returns will only be slightly lower than gross market returns due to the minimal costs and taxes associated with passive market index fund strategies.

In contrast, the scientific investment literature has repeatedly demonstrated that active investment strategies most often lead to inferior rather than superior net risk-adjusted investment portfolio returns. The primary reasons are fourfold:                                           

*  First, the investment securities industry offers products to make a profit. If you are willing to pay more because you think superior past performance will persist, the financial industry is willing to keep accepting your money. A large part of the amateur investing public naively chases historical performance, and the financial industry has mastered this game. If they make more in fees now, they are happy. If past performance does not persist, they have no skin in your personal investment game. However, they will always have another batch of expensive funds to sell to you, some of which happened to do better in the past. Would you now like to try one of them with your diminished portfolio assets? Many individual investors seem never to learn, and their persistent demand is why the active management industry thrives.  
*  Second, actively managed investment strategies require high cost professionals to manage and high trading costs to execute. The more you try to win, the more it costs. The more it costs to play the game, the harder it is to win. 
*  Third, the financial industry incurs very significant sales and marketing costs to convince investors to take a chance and commit their money. If you become a customer, you get the privilege of paying to be sold to, when you pay sales loads charges and annual sales and marketing fees. (On the other hand, if you are not willing to pay high investment fees, then you will not have to listen to all the wrong-headed promotional hype and rubbish that comes with this territory.                      
*  Fourth, by targeting subsets of the overall securities market, the average active strategy will incur additional investment risks without additional securities market compensation. The scientific investment literature has shown that markets pay risk premiums over the long-term, but they tend not to provide risk compensation for betting on subsets of available securities.  

In effect, active strategies take on more investment risk without risk compensation compared to fully diversified passive investment strategies. In the short-term, some investors will be lucky, but most others will not. Over the long-term, however, good and bad luck tends to even out, and active investors tend to fall behind, because of their higher costs and higher taxes. Meanwhile, they take a bumpier road in terms of higher portfolio price volatility or risk. 

A short, clearly written, and excellent paper on active management written by William F. Sharpe is available. Its title is "The Arithmetic of Active Management."  Dr. Sharpe is a Stanford University Professor Emeritus and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (1990). His article was published in 1991 in The Financial Analysts' Journal (Vol. 47, No. 1, January/February 1991. pp. 7-9). Professor Sharpe convincingly argues that in any period the performance of the average actively managed fund mathematically must trail the performance of the average passively managed fund by the average difference in fund management costs. In April 2007, this article was available on Professor Sharpe's website.  

The scientific investment literature provides pitifully little encouragement that individual investors can:

*  predict individual prices of stocks and bonds or the future value of the securities markets
*  select a securities portfolio that will beat the market consistently, and/or
*  identify and hire investment managers who will deliver superior performance net of their added costs.

While there is very substantial variation in the returns achieved by one individual investor or professional investment manager, when compared to another, failure or success is overwhelmingly due to luck rather than skill. Resulting from real-time competition among armies of high and low skill investors, risk-adjusted securities market prices tend to make everyone mediocre over the long-term. Luck dominates, when informed investors on both sides set market prices that continuously balance supply and demand and rapidly adjust, as new positive and negative information becomes known. Sustained securities selection prowess is very, very scarce, and certainly, it is not available for individual investors to hire at a reasonable price that leaves them a net profit.

Superior and sustained skill-based performance net of costs and taxes has been too elusive to find after hundreds of scientifically constructed securities market studies. While lucky past winners may tout their historical prowess, the scientific investment literature has repeatedly demonstrated that better past performance simply is not a predictor of future performance. The small print of the legally required, “protect-your-behind” securities disclosures is actually correct. 

All the securities industry’s promotional “Historically, We’re Been Better than the Other Guy” marketing messages just draw your attention toward meaningless superior historical performance charts or stars that are predominantly accidental. Surprisingly to most investors, it turns out that only the very worst of past performance tends to be a very slight indicator of future performance. Relatively poor past investment performance slightly predicts relatively poor future investment performance. Again, excessive costs seem to be the main culprit associated with past poor performance leading to poor future performance. 

The average active individual investor is clearly less knowledgeable and skilled than the average active professional investor. The scientific investment literature indicates that the average active individual investor who self-assembles a portfolio composed of individually purchased stocks and bonds will continue to make systematic errors, which will cause him to trail the performance of the average professional manager. In doing somewhat better, it is likely that professionals do better partly at the expense of amateurs. 

For example, individual investors tend to sell their winners quickly and hold on to their losers practically forever, and most professionals know to do just the opposite. Since very slight price trend persistence has been detected in some securities prices over time, professionals have tended to capture more value through this practice, and individuals have captured less. Nevertheless, scientific studies have not shown that professionals or amateurs can pick securities in the first place that will eventually demonstrate this price trend persistence. Professionals just seem to do a better job of harvesting returns from the winners that they have been lucky enough to pick. 

The logical conclusion might seem that, as portfolio managers, individual investors should relegate themselves to the sidelines and hire active professionals to play for them. There is strong scientific evidence that the average investor does a very poor job of managing his personal portfolio of individual securities. In the process, he fails to diversify adequately and his returns badly trail a passive index fund strategy. Almost all individual investors should fire themselves as portfolio managers and buy funds instead.   

To achieve diversification economically, individual investors are almost compelled to buy mutual funds and exchange traded funds. In doing so, they must hire professionals. Nevertheless, individual investors still do not have to buy the higher cost actively managed funds, when numerous and much lower cost passively managed funds are available.

The scientific investment literature has also shown that efforts to identify active managers who will consistently beat the market have been futile. Counting the number of years a fund manager has been with a fund, judging where she went to school, estimating the number of gray hairs on his balding head, or other such factors have not distinguished which active manager will do better or worse in the future.

While active professionals generally do better than amateurs do, overall their added costs far exceed their value-added. Individual investors face a simple cost-benefit dilemma. The average actively managed professional fund prices its services well above its value-added in terms of increased returns. Since there is no reliable means to detect beforehand which professional or fund will actually deliver superior performance, the average individual investor inevitably will pay more and get less. 

The only way escape this dilemma is to avoid playing this beat-the-market game entirely. Instead, the more reliable, albeit still risky, road to higher expected long-term risk-adjusted returns involves targeting a passive market return, while aggressively driving down investment costs and avoiding unnecessary investment taxes. Relatively efficient securities markets allow passive market index investors to take a free ride on the higher costs paid by active investors. Active investors pay the significant costs of making securities market prices relatively efficient and the market’s return very hard to beat. Passive investors ride to the same destination, but their lower priced tickets mean that they are more likely to have fatter wallets at the end of the journey. Chance will still be a significant factor. However, the range of variation in success or failure for the investors who targeted a passive, index return will tends to be much narrower, compared to those who pay a lot extra again and again as they keep swinging for the fences.