Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Final Score: ETFs 1: Leafs 0

Too much success can be a bad thing.

The Toronto Maple Leafs don’t need to put a competitive team on the ice. Season ticket holders already compete for 90% of all seats, broadcasting revenues are maxed and virtually every game is sold out.

The Leafs represent a clear distortion in the marketplace. There is little incentive to win because fans act irrationally.

The popularity and institutional success of passive investing in general (replicating the performance of an index), and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in particular, have led some to believe that distortions result because investors act rationally.

“ETFs are radically changing the markets to the point where they, and not the trading of underlying securities, are effectively setting the prices of stocks of smaller capitalization companies, or the potential new growth companies of the future,” write Harold Bradley and Robert R. Litan in a 2010 paper for the Kauffman Foundation.

The authors are concerned about ETFs and other influences they feel discourage new issues and impede the efficiency of capital markets. They believe the popularity of ETFs has led to trading volumes that overwhelm the liquidity of underlying securities, thus distorting valuations.


Fundamental to the authors’ argument is the dominance of passive over active investing. Dominance that overrides the arbitrage of individual stocks gives their argument credibility.

The case for indexing

In an analysis for Vanguard research, “The Case for Indexing in Canada,” authors Philips, Walker and Kinniry restate in a Canadian context what others have observed elsewhere: that costs are difficult for active managers to overcome. The asset-weighted expense ratio for actively managed Canadian equities funds was 2.29% (May 31, 2010) versus 0.87% for Index funds, a difference of 1.42%. Cap-weighted Canadian equity ETFs have expense ratios between 0.07% (HXT) and 0.25% (XIC) for a difference of 2.04-2.22%.

Active management can occasionally overcome this disadvantage in the short term but has difficulty over the long term. The sidebar (see “Relative performance of Canadian actively managed funds”) from the Vanguard study shows the consistency with which actively managed funds underperform their benchmarks, and somewhat alarming median annual return shortfalls.

The (weak) case for active management

1. The most popular argument for active management is a desire to beat the market. Advisors say the only way to guarantee you won’t beat the market is to index. It is possible to pick an outperforming stock but difficult to do so consistently, and really difficult to pick a portfolio of winners. If investors selected only a few stocks, watched them closely and kept trading costs low, they would have more success because high turnover costs kill returns. Picking active, outperforming mutual funds is a low-probability activity. Nevertheless, investors try to pick winners because they think it is possible.

2. Fun. Indexing isn’t. There is no question that passive investing is the intelligent choice. Lower costs boost returns, but talking about stock picks is more fun. People do it even if they aren’t quite sure what they are doing. There is higher entertainment value to active management.

3. Special knowledge. In most professional endeavours, specialized education is a barrier to entry. With no apology to my portfolio manager colleagues, picking stocks is not neurosurgery. Anybody can do it. Results may not be consistent and the methodology may at times resemble picking horses at the track, but anybody can open an online account and get some kind of return. In bull markets they are likely to be successful. Less so in bear markets. Investing is egalitarian.

Current SEC investigations aside, material non-public information is difficult to obtain and illegal to use, so potential access to inside information is no longer an advantage for Street veterans. Twenty-four-hour business news media has given the public access to the same information as the professionals, on as timely a basis. The poor record of investment professionals—reflected in the mutual fund numbers—suggests that educated and experienced pros find outperforming difficult. Despite what should be a discouraging record, mutual funds have 20 times the assets of ETFs in Canada. This is hardly the overwhelming dominance to which the Kauffman paper alludes.

4. The superstar. Western society has a fascination with the superior individual. The U.S. Naval Academy graduate with a Harvard MBA and PhD in Quantitative Finance from Wharton must be a superior human being and should be able to build portfolios that outperform on any basis. If such a person exists, she is working at a hedge fund and couldn’t care less about your money or mine!


5. Not-so-smart people do it. Hubris is a huge motivator. The annoying neighbour, the chatty dentist, and Uncle Fred the blowhard all talk about how they picked the stock of the decade. Maybe they did, but you will also notice that only lottery winners are interviewed, not the hundreds of thousands of losers. Ask Uncle Fred about his portfolio’s total return over five years for a reality check.

There’s not much of a case for active management. In Canada, however, a $12 billion-a-year gorilla of an investment industry stands between the retail investor and the door containing common sense. Greed will always create the motivation to arbitrage the valuation of underlying securities in an index. This may not happen as instantly as the Kauffman authors would like, but if there is an opportunity to squeeze a penny from the market, it will be done.

In the face of all this illogical behaviour, investors can still efficiently participate in the long-term growth of an economy, sector or industry using ETFs at low cost and with full transparency. Unlike the long-suffering, irrational Maple Leafs fan, an ETF investor may appear to perform in mediocre fashion throughout the season but in the long run will beat 90% of the competition.

Stanley Cup? Who cares, because someone other than the owners will be laughing their way to the bank: you.

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