Wall Street Is A Rentier Rip-Off: Index Funds Beat 99.6% Of Managers Over Ten Years

thenews 2013.04.29 14:11

The entire financial management industry is a profit-skimming rentier arrangement.

It may seem uncharitable to note that only .4%--that's 4/10th of 1%--of mutual fund managers outperform a plain-vanilla S&P 500 index fund over 10 years, but that is being generous: by other measures, it's an infinitesimal 1/10th of 1%.

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According to the folks at the Motley Fool, only ten of the ten thousand actively managed mutual funds available managed to beat the S&P 500 consistently over the course of the past ten years.Consider the following: a quick glance at Yahoo Finance reveals the average expense ratio for growth and income style mutual funds is 1.29%. As a result, approximately $1,883 of every $10,000 invested over the course of ten years will go to the fund company in the form of expenses. Compare that to the Vanguard 500 fund, designed to mirror the S&P 500 index, which boasts an annual expense ratio of only 0.12%, resulting in ten-year compounded expense of $154 for every $10,000 invested.

Frequent contributor B.C. recently screened 24,711 funds on Yahoo Finance's fund screener and 17,785 funds on the Wall Street Journal's online screening tool. The results were sobering, to say the least: using a basic set of criteria, the first screen turned up a mere 5 managers who beat the S&P 500 index over five years. Using a slightly different set of criteria, the second screen found 71 funds out of 17,785 outperformed the index over ten years.

That's .4% of managed funds, i.e. an index fund beat 99.6% of all fund managers.

So what do we get for investing our capital in mutual funds and hedge funds? The warm and fuzzy feeling that we've contributed the liquidity needed to grease a monumental skimming operation. Ten out of 10,000 is simply signal noise; in effect, nobody beats an index fund.

The entire financial management industry is a rentier arrangement: they skim immense profits and return no productive yield at all. This is of course a key characteristic of the neofeudal debtocracy that is the U.S. economy: various cartels and state fiefdoms operate rentier arrangements that skim a percentage of the national income, protected by the state and endless PR from any market forces or transparency.