It’s common for a mutual fund to outperform its benchmark over a short time horizon – a few years – as happened with Cathie Wood’s ARKK. But new research shows that mutual funds fail dismally when performance is measured over the long horizons that retirement-focused investors face.
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While investment decisions can stretch over decades, much of the research on mutual fund performance has examined outperformance over relatively short horizons. Since investors are concerned about long-term outcomes, Hendrik Bessembinder, Michael Cooper and Feng Zhang, authors of the study, “Mutual Fund Performance at Long Horizons,” published in the January 2023 issue of the Journal of Financial Economics, examined the frequency with which individual mutual funds outperformed benchmarks in terms of compound (annualized) returns over various horizons. They began by noting: “The majority of the existing empirical literature focuses on observed monthly returns and constructs performance measures, e.g. Sharpe ratios, alphas, etc. that rely on the conditional or unconditional arithmetic mean of those monthly returns.” Thus, their focus was on the impact of volatility on long-horizon returns.
Their data sample included nearly 8,000 U.S. equity mutual funds covering the 30-year period 1991-2020. They relied on a simple single-factor (beta) market model because their focus was on the effects of the compounding of random returns over long horizons, not on the question of which benchmarks or factor models were most appropriate. They chose the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) as their broad market benchmark – SPY returns are net of any fees, trading costs or other expenses, and investors could have captured compound SPY returns using a simple buy-and-hold strategy with dividend reinvestment. Following is a summary of their findings:
- The percentage of funds that outperformed market benchmarks decreased with the horizon over which returns were measured.
- On average, funds were contained in the database for just 11 years.
- The excess beta-adjusted compound return was negative for the majority of funds and was even negative for some funds where the alpha estimated from monthly returns was positive – one of every six funds in the sample that had a positive monthly arithmetic mean market-adjusted return had a negative lifetime market-adjusted buy-and-hold return.
- In the monthly data, equity mutual fund returns exceeded the matched-month return to the SPY ETF for 47.2% of observations. The percentage of sample funds that generated buy-and-hold returns that exceeded buy-and-hold returns to the SPY decreased to 41.1% at the annual horizon, 38.3% at the decade horizon and 30.3% at the full sample horizon.
- Only 29.6% of a sample of the largest funds outperformed the SPY in terms of compound full sample returns – the finding that most funds underperformed the SPY was quite uniform across size-based samples.
- Fees had large effects over long horizons.
- Over 20% of funds failed to outperform one-month U.S. Treasury bills during the sample period, and more than 40% of those funds that were present in the data for less than five years underperformed Treasury bills over their lives – demonstrating the importance of the role that survivorship bias can play in the data.
- The cross-sectional distribution of long-horizon fund buy-and-hold returns was strongly positively skewed (such skewness was not observable in monthly returns) and increased with the length of the horizon. The positive skewness in compound long-horizon returns is of substantial practical importance because, in a positively skewed distribution, a potentially large majority of possible future realizations are less than the mean outcome.
- Reflecting the positive skewness in returns, the median compound fund return was less than the mean compound fund returns at all horizons except monthly.
- While positive skewness implies that many funds underperformed, some funds performed well. Out of 7,883 sample funds, 442 delivered a positive full sample compound return more than twice as large as the compound return to the SPY over the matched months, and 160 delivered compound returns three times as large as the SPY during the matched months of the full sample.
- Mutual fund investors’ aggregate wealth decreased by $1.31 trillion relative to the SPY benchmark over the sample period 1991-2020.
Read the full article here by Larry Swedroe, Advisor Perspectives.
