I spent about 5 days in the sleepy town of Kota Kinabalu,
two of which were spent climbing Mount Kinabalu. I wish I could say I sprung up
the mountain and posed like the Baboon in the
Lion King as wildlife grovelled at my feet. Closer to reality it was a
drunken stumble with pink
elephants on parade.
On a sidenote, I think “pink elephants on parade” is one
piece of supporting evidence for legalizing drugs for artistic/commercial
purposes. Just an opinion.
But apart from climbing mountains in a semi-delusional
state, I found the time to finish a first read of Nassim
Nicholas Taleb’s “Fooled By Randomness” (2nd ed). The essential
argument I took away from the first read through, was that markets are
literally more random than you can think. I’d use the word imagine, but
imagination is often the
aborted fetus of logic-driven investment decisions, so the burden of
comprehending the randomness of markets will sit squarely on the shoulders of
conscious thought.
One discussion that struck me was two chapters devoted to
illustrating and discussing the concept of survivorship bias.
Survivorship bias, as defined
by Investopedia, is:
“The tendency for mutual funds with poor performance to be
dropped by mutual fund companies, generally because of poor results or low
asset accumulation. This phenomenon, which is widespread in the fund
industry, results in an overestimation of the past returns of mutual
funds.”
This is relevant to my portfolio, since I do tend to look
closely at the performance of funds when I go about selecting them. So what’s
to be done about this?
Some data providers have created survivorship bias free indices,
which includes constituents (like funds, stocks, bonds, derivatives…pretty
much any asset that can be invested in, will be) that have been
merged/acquired/closed. It’s a lot of effort to track dead assets and one would
have to ask, does it matter and if so, how much?
In the case of a
stock market, it’s known that index constituents remain constituents only if
they meet a set of criteria, which includes track record, profitability
(pre-tax losses for 3 recent consecutive financial years), and minimum market capitalization
(an average daily marketcap of S$40m over the last 120 days). Link to SGX rule
book here.
This is the essence of survivorship bias – any company that falls below the
criteria is automatically filtered out, leaving only ‘survivors’. No wonder stock
markets have an upward bias.
In the case of funds, if they fall below a certain amount of
assets, then there’s a good chance the fund will merge. If a fund
manager consistently underperforms the market, then there’s a good chance
the assets will be transferred to another manager’s watch, leaving only ‘survivors’.
So mutual funds have an upward bias too – good managers stay, bad managers drop
out.
So as long as one sticks around long enough without getting
booted off the game, you’d considered a winner, even if it means hugging the
benchmark like a python with separation issues. From a past performance
perspective, this suggests that looking at past performance to determine a
manager’s returns are due to luck (going along for wherever the market feels
like taking me) or skill (sorta like luck, but requires more preparation) is of
limited value. Which is unfortunate, because past performance is often all one
has to go on. According to this
article most academic literature has only demonstrated fund manager returns
are more likely due to luck rather than skill. As far as I know, no one has
identified how to separate the Homers
from the homers.
So if fund selection based on performance is of little to no
value, where does that leave me? Down to the elements I can control – asset allocation,
selection and diversification. I would love to find a method that helps me
identify fund managers with a
consistent strategy that will over time beat markets, but I’m not sure if
it exists. And even if it did, in all honesty, if it comes from an academic
journal, I’m not sure I would find it a) understandable or b) applicable…especially
if it’s arcane academia
written by Taleb.
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| He looks better bald and rich |
