The Average Actively Managed Fund Must Underperform the Index

In last Saturday’s Globe & Mail (finally got around to reading the paper today), Rob Carrick compared the performance of Canadian equity funds to a low-cost index ETF that covers the entire Canadian market, iShares CDN Composite Index Fund ETF (XIC). It is the one I own to capture the Canadian market and it makes up the entire Candian equity portion of my portfolio. He went five years back because the ETF has not been around for 10-years yet. He compared this ETF to the “100 or so funds in the Canadian equity category that have been around for the five years to Sept. 30.” Surprise, surprise, only 5 mutual funds beat the index over that period. Here are some of those funds, sorted by 5-yr % return:

Note that some funds that started 5 years ago probably got canned due to poor results (or other reasons) and are thus excluded from the “100 or so equity funds” that Carrick mentions. See Survivorship Bias.

These results should come as no shock to anyone. If it does surprise/shock you, I recommend reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street as Burton Malkiel explains the reasons why index funds do much better far better than I can. You don’t even have to believe in efficient-market theory. According to Malkiel (and others of course):

But even if markets were not efficient, indexing would still be a very useful investment strategy. Since all the stocks in the market must be owned by someone, it follows that all the investors in the market will earn, on average, the market return. The index fund achieves the market return with minimal expenses. The average actively managed fund incurs an expense ratio of about 1.5 percent per year [ed: in Canada I think this is higher]. Thus the average actively managed fund must underperform the market as a whole by the amount of the expenses that are deducted from the gross return achieved.

The only way mutual funds will do you any good is if you can predict beforehand which mutual funds will be one of the handful that do outperform the indexes (good luck). He goes on mention that this claim is actually borne out in the data from the US market in the past 20 or so years,

Between 1974 and 2006, for example, the S&P 500 outperformed more than three-quarters of the public equity mutual funds–the average annual total return for the S&P 500 was more than 1.5 percentage points better than that of the media fund

Again survivorship bias plays a role here. If we included some of the funds that existed in 1974 but did not make it to 2006, the S&P 500 would most likely have outperformed an even larger fraction of the public equity mutual funds from 1974 to 2006.