With just over a week to go in 2005, Bill Miller’s Value Trust fund looks set to beat the S&P for the 15th consecutive year.
Certainly, Mr. Miller’s 14-year winning streak is impressive, especially in the context of professional fund management, an industry in which the average fund manager typically underperforms broad market indices like the S&P 500. Mutual fund screeners (e.g., Yahoo’s, which takes data from Morningstar) show about 11,000 stock funds. Noting that 11,000 sits between 2-to-the-13th power (8,182) and 2-to-the-14th power (16,384), we should expect by pure probability alone to find about one fund manager in 11,000 who has a winning streak of 13 or 14 years (similar to performing 11,000 trials of 13 or 14 coin tosses and finding one streak of all heads). From this perspective, Mr. Miller’s performance is still exceptional (just as a string of all heads is exceptional), but we should not be surprised to find an exceptional performer among the many thousands of mutual fund managers out there. In other words, while Mr. Miller does appear to have a “golden touch,” he is not necessarily a living incarnation of King Midas.