Beating the S&P 500 with Stock Market Timing

Monday, March 4, 2013

By Wille Smithe


Copyright 2006 Equitrend, Incorporated.

Roughly 75% of fund chiefs don't beat the S&P 500 year in and year out. How can a basket of 500 hundred stocks beat the bulk of actively managed hedge funds? The people that manage these funds are, for the most part, brilliant people. They are highly educated and have accessibility to the most advanced info and call support systems internationally. So why is it that they do not outperform the S&P 500?

A Fast Test:

Here's a very crude test of management performance: Let's compare the domestic-equity retirement fund performance supplied by Morningstar against the S&P 500 index for one, three, 5 and ten-year periods, looking backwards from April 30, 1995. The S&P 500 index is a fair comparison for big, domestic corporations.

Our results:

Of the 1,097 funds Morningstar covered for the one year period, 110 beat the S&P 500, while 987 fell short. Results ranged from 46.84% to -32.26%, while the S&P 500 accomplished a 17.44% return.

In the three-year period, the S&P 500 returned 10.54%, while results in the funds sundry from 29.28% to -15.02% compounded yearly. Of the total 609 funds, only 266 beat the S&P 500.

Shifting to the five-year period, of 470 funds, 204 beat the S&P 500. Results ranged from 27.35% to -8.51%, while the index notched up 12.62%.

At a decade, only 56 of 262 funds managed to beat the index, and results varied from 24.77% to -4.06% compounded yearly against 14.78% for the S&P 500.

The proven fact that most funds do not beat the final stock exchange shouldn't be surprising. Since the majority of cash invested in the stock exchange comes from mutual funds, it would be mathematically impossible for the majority all these funds to out perform the market.

The implied promise held out to financiers in actively managed mutual funds is that in exchange for higher charges (relative to index funds), the actively managed fund will deliver superior market performance. There are a large number of barriers to fulfilling this implied guarantee.

Some of the issues are:

The larger a mutual fund gets, the more complicated it becomes to supply outstanding performance.

Though fund size runs counter to performance, fund executives have a strong incentive to let the fund grow as sizeable as possible because the larger the fund gets, the more money the fund executives make.

Most skilled hedge fund chiefs are hired away by hedge funds, where their fiscal rewards are greater and there are just a few limitations on investment methods.

By law retirement funds should be conservative, which in theory limits their likely losses. This conservative stance generally limits their abilities to use arbitrage, options, or shorting stocks.

Can You Do Better?

Due to the general inflexibility and restrictions of most retirement funds, your investing funds isn't properly hedged against market fluctuations. In most situations, if you compared the beta of the equity exposure held in actively managed retirement funds to an equal equity exposure to the S&P 500 index, your reward/risk proportion would be less rewarding than buying an identical equity exposure to the S&P 500 index. So , the answer's, you can do better and beat the S & P 500 by using an effective stock market timing system.




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