Index Funds

[Osen']

Это Vanguard sales pitch или идея имеет ноги? Что думаете?
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/stupidest-money/
It’s hard enough to save for a house, tuition, or retirement. So why are we willing to pay big fees for subpar investment returns? Enter the low-cost index fund. The revolution will not be monetized.
A study found that only the top 2 to 3 percent of active-fund managers had enough skill to cover their cost.
The delusion comes in the form of how the stock markets actually work.
We don’t understand the negative-sum nature of active investing. Whatever you win, I lose. Whatever I win, you lose, and we both paid to play that game.
And then the second problem we have [is] most people suffer from overconfidence, particularly in noisy environments where the feedback is weak. That describes the stock market. It’s incredibly noisy and it’s really easy to misinterpret what the return on your portfolio means.
That’s a pretty typical setup. Many investors pay firms to manage their money — sometimes a percentage of assets, sometimes a flat fee. In return, you may get a variety of services — including advice about insurance or taxes. And, of course, investment advice: how best to save for a house, or your kids’ tuition, or retirement, whatever. Why pay someone for that advice? Because, let’s face it, investing can be confusing, and intimidating. All that terminology; all those options. So you hire someone to navigate that for you — and they, in turn, use their expertise to pick the very best investments for your needs. This is called active management. They actively select, let’s say, the best mutual funds for your needs. And you pay them for their expertise. You also pay those mutual funds, by the way — sometimes there’s what called a sales load when you buy it; and an expense ratio, a recurring fee the fund deducts from your account. So, between the mutual fund fees and the investment fees, that’s usually at least a couple percent off the top — and that’s whether your funds go up or down, by the way. So hopefully they go up. Hopefully the active management you’re paying for is at least covering the costs?
So what Fama and I were doing in that paper is trying to figure out when a fund does really well, should we attribute that to a manager that is incredibly talented and really beating the market? Or are we just looking at the result of luck?
That is, did their funds rise in value because of their stock-picking skill — or, perhaps, simply because the market was rising? And, again, the Fama-French finding:
So the top 2 to 3 percent [have] enough skill to cover their costs. Everybody else: down below that.
Ouch. It’s enough to make you think that maybe it’s not worth paying those investment experts for their expertise. If only there were some simple, cheap way to avoid all that active investing that often doesn’t pay off and just passively own, say, a small piece of the entire stock market. Well, as you may know, there is. They’re called index funds and E.T.F.s, for exchange-traded funds. They can be bought very cheap. And in recent years, a lot of people have been buying them.
When we look at the fund flows over the past few years, there is a massive outflow from active fund management.
The number comes out to around a trillion and a half flowing into index funds and a half a trillion flowing out of active funds, which is a $2 trillion shift in investor preferences. It is a revolution.
Vanguard is clearly the leaders in low-cost indexing. They’re now four trillion dollars, right? That’s an astonishing number.

[+KPOT+]

Это не сейлс питч. Это реальные исследования. Вы даже сами при желании можете посидеть в Экселе посчитать, сравнить. Всё в общем правильно написано, но туды тоже с умом вкладывать надо. Например, когда рынок идёт вниз, надо планомерно закупать, а не продавать.