There are problems with trackers and closet trackers I sthat you have to by the dog's
Some of my actively managed funds managed to avoid a lot of the loss on bank shares - a tracker would have had to keep holding risky bank stocks or say enron and take the loss
That's the fallacy of active management, though. Given enough time, these active funds make enough bad decisions to wipe out the good ones, especially when you factor in the fees. We've got plenty of data on this phenomenon.
Don't you think that when almost everyone is saying just chose trackers / index funds that that would not indicate - that's is a bad idea to follow the heard?
As one Wall street type said "when the shoe shine boy was giving you stock tips" he started to get worried
"You're following the herd" seems to be the latest bit of FUD pushed by active managers, but they're still not making a good case for their own ability to beat the herd.
> In the WSJ feature, the darts won 55 of the 142 contests, and the pros won 87. That 61% to 39% margin would be a blow in an election, but remember: this is not just any old human vs. darts. This is the best in the business against randomness.
> In their new book, Dubner and his coauthor Steven Levitt cite a study by CXO Advisory Group examining 6,000 stock market predictions by so-called experts over several years. Experts’ overall accuracy rate was 47.4%.
> Indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal’s online screening tool, only 71 of 17,785 funds—just 0.4%—outperformed the S&P over 10 years.
Also not a good example. Individual fund managers, financiers, etc. often make individual correct (or lucky, sometimes) decisions. It's their ability to do that continuously for decades that's very much in doubt.
That just moves the problem away from stock-picking to manager-picking. How do you pick a "good" manager as a retail investor? A winning track record could just be the result of survivorship bias.
Some of my actively managed funds managed to avoid a lot of the loss on bank shares - a tracker would have had to keep holding risky bank stocks or say enron and take the loss