Mutual Fund

Your 401k account is probably loaded up in the wrong asset class

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401k accounts good and bad. They’re mostly good because they provide an avenue for people to save and invest money for their future, but there are some things to watch out for.

Good stuff:

  • The main benefit of a 401k is that it allows you to invest qualified money. You could just invest money on your own, but investing in your 401k accounts means that you get some significant tax advantages (no capital gains on the growth of your investments and an income tax break). The same advantages apply to IRA accounts, but 401ks include two other significant advantages.
  • Many employers offer a matching contribution. For example, if you contribute a certain small percentage of your income (say 5%), the employer may kick in an additional small percentage into your 401k account (say 4%). That’s free money, and you should definitely take it.
  • 401k contributions are capped at $19,000 per year by the employee, employer contributions can exceed that. IRA contributions are capped at $6,000 per year. Not all of us are maxing out our qualified retirement accounts, but the larger cap offered by 401k accounts is certainly an advantage.

Bad stuff:

  • 401k accounts offer a limited number of investing options, and they’re almost never great. 401k Plan sponsors (employers) are typically concerned with one thing when choosing a plan: cost. If the plan seems expensive it will be harder to explain to the board, regardless of the value or benefits of the portfolio and the advisor.
  • Your money is locked up for as long as you work at the company. You’re stuck with the options available and you can’t move the money elsewhere unless you leave or retire.
  • Investors have little to no help deciding which funds or options to use within the 401k so they end up in default options, which are usually target dated funds. You may have seen these funds that end with a future year, like 2045, which you’d be in if you were expected to retire sometime around 2045. A target dated fund is not the worst investment you could be in (which isn’t saying much) but it’s far from ideal. A target dated fund will load you up in U.S. large growth companies (essentially the S&P 500), sprinkle in some international large growth companies, and decide what percentage of your money should be in bonds based on the target year. Unfortunately, in the history of the market, large growth company asset classes are among the lowest-performing of any asset classes over time. A target dated fund is usually made up of index funds (along with their inherent problems) so at least it’s not active, but it will sacrifice large amounts of return over time because of its poor diversification.

Don’t be afraid to use your 401k account, especially if your employer offers a matching contribution (again, free money). But if you’ve obtained the maximum matching contribution, think about investing additional money into a better portfolio through an IRA. Unfortunately, your 401k is probably loaded up in the wrong asset class.

Index bubble

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This passive investing/index bubble idea from a Michael Burry interview continues to circulate. The idea has appeal, not the idea that another recession is imminent, but the idea that we could accurately predict one coming, and that the cause could actually make sense to us. The argument is fairly simple. A larger percentage of people are buying index funds, especially the S&P 500, than ever before. Index fund investors tend not to analyze each company in the S&P 500, they simply buy the index which owns all of them. So Burry worries that since fewer and fewer people are conducting analysis on company fundamentals, the prices of these companies are going to be inflated by virtue of the simple fact that they’re included in an index, not because they’re good companies that people believe in. That makes sense. The question then, is how much analysis and trading do we need in order to maintain a decent level of price discovery in the market? If index funds stifle price discovery, how do we avoid a bubble? Here are a few responses:

  • Even a small amount of price discovery (studying fundamentals, making trades, supply and demand) makes a huge difference for prices to reflect value. We don’t need large swaths of the market conducting analysis.
  • If 100% of invested assets were in index funds the price discovery argument might hold some weight. You would have to assume that there would be almost no company fundamental analysis happening, not an unreasonable jump but still an assumption. However, the truth is that only about 45% of invested assets are in index funds, and there’s still a host of investors and dollars outside of passive index funds working to set prices.
  • Index investing actually adds data to the market, it contributes to price discovery. Instead of contributing data on specific stocks, it contributes to larger market sector data as people commit dollars to different indexes across the world, which is helpful market data.
  • Despite the growth of index fund investing, global stock trading volume has actually remained about the same over the last ten years. People use passive vehicles to actively trade. Many index fund dollars are in ETFs among the most traded funds on the market. Just because money is in index funds does not mean that it’s passive. The activity all contributes to price discovery.
  • Some passive investors (like us!) actually do use some fundamental analysis in constructing portfolios (structured funds). And even our passive investors occasionally make trades; in order to rebalance, when they make contributions or withdrawals, etc. Even the most passive investors contribute to price discovery.
  • If the market was losing efficiency and price discovery as a result of growing index fund investors, we would expect to see an uptick in active money manager performance. Active managers would find the mispriced companies in the index and reap corresponding rewards. But the data shows no improvement, active managers have performed slightly worse over the last three years than before.

Despite the uptick in index and passive investing, price discovery is as strong as it ever has been in the stock market. Michael Burry’s comments on the index bubble are interesting and even sound plausible, but upon close inspection look misguided. Passive investing is still the way to go, though you do have permission to dump those index funds.

Index Issues (part 1)

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Passive index investing has seen significant growth over the last 30 years as an alternative to active (stock picking) investing. Studies surrounding active investing have shown that on the whole, active investors underperform the market significantly, for two main reasons: high fees and poor stock selecting. As people come to grips with the problems inherent to active investing they naturally turn towards index funds, which seems to solve both of the problems listed above. Index funds are typically very cheap to own (solves the fee problem), and instead of actively picking stocks, they simply own sections of the market (solves the poor stock picking problem). Sounds pretty good, right?
Well, it’s definitely better than an active investment strategy but index funds are not without their problems, and they’re certainly not the best way to invest your money. Here are a few issues:

  1. An index is arbitrary. The S&P 500 Index (the most popular index out there) was created more as a measurement than an investment vehicle. It’s simply a list of 500 of the largest companies in the U.S., there’s no magic to the number 500. But that’s the thing, indexes were not created to maximize investor returns or diversify into asset classes in the most strategic way, they’re just arbitrary measurements.
  2. Index funds are almost all cap-weighted. This is an important thing to note. What this means is the larger the company, the larger percent of the index it takes up. In the S&P 500, the largest 10 companies take up 20% or more of the entire index while the bottom 10 companies take up less than 0.2%. In any index, most of your money is going into the most valuable several companies instead of being evenly diversified. A total U.S. market index fund, while seemingly offering lots of diversification, is almost entirely loaded up in the largest companies because of its cap weighting.
  3. Index fund investing often puts your finger on the trigger. Many index fund investors do their investing on their own since you can own an index fund yourself for a fraction of the cost you could pay an advisor to put you in the exact same fund. I’ve made this point in the past, but when it’s as easy as the click of a button to pull money out of an investment account, people tend to make mistakes. The S&P 500 for instance, has averaged about a 10% return per year for almost 100 years, which is fine, not great, but fine. However, from 2000 to 2009, it averaged a -1% return per year. It doesn’t matter how low the fees were or how well it compared to the stock-picking accounts, precious few of us would have stuck around for those returns over 10 years if we could move the money with the click of a button. Successful investing requires good coaching. Good coaching should include a better portfolio than a bunch of cheap mutual funds.

So what’s the alternative? Stay tuned for part 2.

On REITs

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REITs (Real Estate Investment Trust) are a hot topic in 2019. Real estate is popular, it’s tangible, it’s easy to understand the profits and costs involved, and many of us already own some ourselves. REITs offer the allure of owning income-producing real estate without ever having to take a call from a grumpy tenant or running over to fix a leaky toilet in the middle of the night. It’s real estate investing without all the hassle! Well, that’s not exactly true, here a few reasons to look elsewhere for investing returns:

  1. A REIT is not like investing in real estate the way most of us think about real estate investing (owning rental properties). Traditional real estate investing is a great way to make money, but it’s not passive. Ask anyone who owns rental properties and they’ll tell you it’s a job, maybe a part-time job, maybe a worthwhile job, but a job none-the-less. It takes work and time and good business sense. A REIT is like a mutual fund that only owns income-producing real estate (at least 75% of the income within a REIT must come from rental income or something similar), which sounds similar to traditional investing, but a REIT is completely passive. The expected earnings on the two types of investments are very different because they’re very different types of investments.
  2. Investing in REITs is redundant. If you’re invested in the stock market you already own real estate. In fact, you already own the same exact companies and properties that are also in the REIT you’re thinking about purchasing. You could theoretically double down on real estate, own it both in your investment account and in a REIT, but why would you do that? There are three essential market factors that drive returns: stocks (which outperform bonds over time), small companies (which outperform large companies over time), and value companies (which outperform growth companies over time); real estate doesn’t make the cut. There’s no additional benefit to increasing your exposure to real estate, no additional returns, no additional diversification benefits, nothing. You could buy into a REIT if you have a hunch that real estate as a market sector is going to do well in the next few years but that would be market timing, a proven great way to lose money.

REITs sometimes sound exciting, especially when they’re doing well, but keep the big-picture perspective. No one knows when REITs will do well or for how long, we just know that over time they won’t beat a well-diversified portfolio, which already owns a lot of real estate anyways.

Are you track-record investing?

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Track record investing is the third and last detrimental investment trap I’ll discuss here. Like stock picking and market timing track record investing is as it sounds, using track records or past history to determine whether or not a money manager or specific fund is a good investment.

Track record investing is tricky because we evaluate track records all the time, they’re a normal part of our lives. I use Apple computers instead of windows computer for a few reasons, not least among them is the track record of Apple devices to outlast their windows counterparts. I buy specific products on Amazon only after reading far too many reviews to determine the track record of said product. Track records are not bad, they’re actually super helpful. But, when it comes to investing, it’s dangerous to rely on the same mechanism we use to evaluate Amazon products to decide whether or not a money manager or mutual fund is a good investment. Here are a few reasons why:

The number one disclaimer in the world of investing is “past performance is not indicative of future results.” Why is that phrase posted everywhere? Well, first, because it’s the law. But more importantly, it’s because we so badly want to use track records to determine which mutual funds to invest in, and it doesn’t work. Like we learned about stock picking, people can’t consistently predict the market. If a mutual fund manager does well one year it does not indicate that the manager has figured something out, it means he or she got lucky. People can make guesses about the future, and they do, but no one knows the future, and the market will move based on things that will happen in the future.

A fun example of this past performance issue is Morningstar’s famous five star rating system. Morningstar has long rated funds year after year with one to five star ratings, and it’s a big deal to earn the coveted five stars. However, since 2010 Morningstar has stated that the cost of a fund is a better predictor of its future success than Morningstar’s star rating, essentially admitting that the rating system is useless for evaluating future performance. Track records cannot help when it comes to choosing specific investments.

Another issue with this past performance stuff has to do with the data consumers actually see. Investment companies are notorious for practicing something called selection bias. Selection bias means that if a mutual fund does really poorly, the investment company will kill it and expunge its data from their records so that it has no effect on the overall statistics consumers see. Unfortunately those dead mutual funds often have a drastic effect on returns for real people. The worst 200 funds that were killed between 1923 and 2016 averaged a cumulative return total of -81%. Not only does past performance have nothing to do with future results, but the data consumers see only muddies the water.

So should we shun all data when it comes to investing? Definitely not. It’s important to make a distinction between past performance data, which relates to specific funds or managers or even whole firms, and long term market data, which teaches us about how investing works and where returns come from. I use historical market data all the time, not as if those are returns my firm has achieved since the 1920’s, but to help people understand what to expect from the market, and to show them why diversification is so important. So just remember, past performance really isn’t indicative of future results. Look for an advisor who understands the academics of investing, not one who shovels you past performance data.