The Intelligent Investor_ The Definitive Book on Value Investing - Benjamin Graham [104]
No more fancy footwork. Some companies specialize in “incubating” their funds—test-driving them privately before selling them publicly. (Typically, the only shareholders are employees and affiliates of the fund company itself.) By keeping them tiny, the sponsor can use these incubated funds as guinea pigs for risky strategies that work best with small sums of money, like buying truly tiny stocks or rapid-fire trading of initial public offerings. If its strategy succeeds, the fund can lure public investors en masse by publicizing its private returns. In other cases, the fund manager “waives” (or skips charging) management fees, raising the net return—then slaps the fees on later after the high returns attract plenty of customers. Almost without exception, the returns of incubated and fee-waived funds have faded into mediocrity after outside investors poured millions of dollars into them.
Rising expenses. It often costs more to trade stocks in very large blocks than in small ones; with fewer buyers and sellers, it’s harder to make a match. A fund with $100 million in assets might pay 1% a year in trading costs. But, if high returns send the fund mushrooming up to $10 billion, its trades could easily eat up at least 2% of those assets. The typical fund holds on to its stocks for only 11 months at a time, so trading costs eat away at returns like a corrosive acid. Meanwhile, the other costs of running a fund rarely fall—and sometimes even rise—as assets grow. With operating expenses averaging 1.5%, and trading costs at around 2%, the typical fund has to beat the market by 3.5 percentage points per year before costs just to match it after costs!
Sheepish behavior. Finally, once a fund becomes successful, its managers tend to become timid and imitative. As a fund grows, its fees become more lucrative—making its managers reluctant to rock the boat. The very risks that the managers took to generate their initial high returns could now drive investors away—and jeopardize all that fat fee income. So the biggest funds resemble a herd of identical and overfed sheep, all moving in sluggish lockstep, all saying “baaaa” at the same time. Nearly every growth fund owns Cisco and GE and Microsoft and Pfizer and Wal-Mart—and in almost identical proportions. This behavior is so prevalent that finance scholars simply call it herding.4 But by protecting their own fee income, fund managers compromise their ability to produce superior returns for their outside investors.
FIGURE 9-2 The Funnel of Fund Performance
Looking back from December 31, 2002, how many U.S. stock funds outperformed Vanguard 500 Index Fund?
One year:
1,186 of 2,423 funds (or 48.9%)
Three years:
1,157 of 1,944 funds (or 59.5%)
Five years:
768 of 1,494 funds (or 51.4%)
Ten years:
227 of 728 funds (or 31.2%)
Fifteen years:
125 of 445 funds (or 28.1%)
Twenty years:
37 of 248 funds (or 14.9%)
Source: Lipper Inc.
Because of their fat costs and bad behavior, most funds fail to earn their keep. No wonder high returns are nearly as perishable as unrefrigerated fish. What’s more, as time passes, the drag of their excessive expenses leaves most funds farther and farther behind, as Figure 9.2 shows.5
What, then, should the intelligent investor do?
First of all, recognize that an index fund—which owns all the stocks in the market, all the time, without any pretense of being able to select the “best” and avoid the “worst”—will beat most funds over the long run. (If your company doesn’t offer a low-cost index fund in your 401(k), organize your coworkers and petition to have one added.) Its rock-bottom overhead—operating expenses of 0.2% annually, and yearly trading costs of just 0.1%—give the index fund an insurmountable advantage. If stocks generate, say, a 7% annualized return over the next 20 years, a low-cost index fund like