Chasing Returns

Looking at this morning’s financial section of the paper inevitably had a piece regarding the assets classes and the respective investors (gamblers) that did exceptionally well in 2013. There was mention of a firm that bet heavily on Japanese stocks and did very well, another investor bet against gold and achieved glamorous returns and a hedge fund that bet on US stocks and looked like gods among mortals.

But that’s the problem with these scenarios – we are mortal.

Pick up any financial magazine that reports on funds or stock returns and you’ll see examples of mutual funds, stocks and bonds that have either beaten or done worse than their counterparts. For example, US stocks did very well in 2013 – so a domestic large cap fund would look amazing based on what it did for 2013. Herein lies the problem; the publication is reporting what the fund did, not what it will do.

Investors that chase returns are falling prey to the thinking that past returns are indicative of future results when we know that that’s not the case. There’s no guarantee that the fund or stock or bond will increase in value and there’s no guarantee that it will decline. We just don’t know.

For more specific funds and stocks – there may be a good chance that the fund is going to go down although it may not happen right away. The reason is that when the publications show the funds with amazing returns, there are some people that flock to those funds since they are chasing returns. Prices temporarily increase. What happens next is that those folks that have been in the fund for quite some time sell – and sell a lot. Naturally when there’s quite a bit of selling fund prices drop – and so do the returns of those investors that chased last year’s results.

Another reason prices drop is due to mean reversion. Simply stated mean reversion is the concept that a fund’s prices will move toward their average over time. A simple, but exaggerated example of this is let’s say a fund’s average return is 10% over 20 years. In one year it returns 40% – which is very respectable. However, according to mean reversion it can be expected (although there’s no guarantee as to when) that at some point in the future the fund is going to experience a declination (either gradually or suddenly) in order to get back to its average return of 10%.

Another way to look at this concept is standard deviation (for another article later) which is really how much something flip-flops around an average. To keep things easy, let’s say this fund has a standard deviation of 10% also. With an average return of 10% and a high of 40%, means that this fund went three standard deviations above its average. This means that it could also go three standard deviations below the average or achieve a -20% return.

Without getting too mathematical or statistical on our readers it simply means that this fund flip-flops a lot and if it’s flipped 40% returns in the last year, there’s a good chance it could flop going forward.

Rather than chasing returns a wise choice is to invest broadly among asset classes and diversify accordingly. An excellent way to do this is through indexing – buying index funds of different asset classes (such as stock, bonds real estate and international stocks and bonds). This helps an investor avoid chasing returns and helps them accept that certain asset classes will rise and others will fall – but the combination of all of them in one portfolio not only lowers overall portfolio risk, but prevents an investor from chasing the next big fund – which according to the latest financial magazines – already happened.