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This article originally appeared in ETF.COM here.
Investors would do well to learn from deer hunters and fishermen who know the importance of “being there” and using patient persistence, so they are there when opportunity knocks.
– Charles Ellis, on investment policy
One of my favorite sayings is, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” This is certainly true about investing, which is why I believe that knowledge of investment history is an important, if not necessary, condition of achieving success. The following is offered as evidence.
Distribution of returns
Most investors know that the U.S. stock market has historically returned about 10%: Over the 92-year period from 1927 through 2018, the S&P 500 returned 10.1%. If we were to remove the returns of the best 92 months over that period (not the best month each year, but the highest-returning 92 months of 1,104 months), what would you guess was the return of the remaining 1,012 months? I believe most investors would be shocked to learn that the answer is virtually zero.
The remaining 1,012 months provided an average return of just 0.01%. The best 92 months (just 8.3% of the months) provided an average return of 10.4%, more than 100% of the annualized return over the full period!
In case you think the above is unique to the U.S., we can also look at the data from international markets. Over the 49-year period of 1970 through 2018, the MSCI EAFE Index (gross of dividends) returned 9.1%. The best 49 months provided an average return of 9.6%, while the other 539 months returned 0.0%. Again, we see that the return of the best 49 months was greater than the annualized return over the full period.
We see the same evidence when we look at emerging markets. From 1988 through 2018, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index (gross of dividends) returned 10.4%. The best 31 months of that 31-year period provided an average return of 12.5%, while the other 341 months returned 0.0%. Again, we find that the best 31 months (an average of just one month a year) provided more than 100% of the annualized returns.
Recent data
The following is a more recent example of how much returns happen in short and unpredictable bursts. 2018 was a miserable year for U.S. small value stocks – and the smaller and deeper the value, the worse the performance.
As a fund with large exposures to both the size and value factors, Bridgeway’s Omni Small-Cap Value Fund (BOSVX) (which my firm, Buckingham Strategic Wealth, recommends, and I own) had even worse returns than U.S. small value indexes. Morningstar reports that the fund lost 17.2% in 2018.
Now let’s look at what happened in the month (though in this case, not a calendar month) from the period following the stock market’s bottom on Dec. 24, 2018. On that day, BOSVX closed at 13.30. One month later, on Jan. 24, 2019, the fund’s net asset value (NAV) had risen to 15.24, a gain of 14.6%. As of Feb. 24, the NAV was 16.47, a one-month gain of 8.1% and a two-month return of 23.8%. As we saw in the three earlier examples, so much of the market’s returns come in short, and obviously unpredictable, bursts.
Perhaps it was evidence like the above that convinced Charles Ellis, legendary investment consultant and author of “Winning the Loser’s Game,” that: “The best way to achieve long-term success is not in stock picking and not in market timing and not even in changing portfolio strategy. Sure, these approaches all have their current heroes and war stories, but few hero investors last for long and not all the war stories are entirely true. The great pathway to long-term success comes via sound, sustained investment policy, setting the right asset mix and holding onto it.” (Quoted in the Barrie Dunstan article, “Global Money Masters,” Australian Financial Review, November 2006.)
Such evidence likely also influenced the thinking of William Sherden, who, in his book “The Fortune Sellers,” advised: “Avoid market timers, for they promise something they cannot deliver. Cancel your subscription to market timing newsletters. Tell the investment advisers selling the latest market-timing scheme to buzz off. Ignore news media predictions, since they haven’t a clue … Stop asking yourself, and everyone you know, ‘What’s the market going to do?’ It is an irrelevant question, because it cannot be answered.”
Read the full article here by Larry Swedroe, Advisor Perspectives
