>> Now I want to present to you in the last part of this lecture the idea of,
do mutual fund managers actually beat the market?
And this ties in with what we discussed in the early part of this lecture,
which is the efficient markets part.
And if you remember there, we said one way of testing if the markets
are efficient is to see if people have indeed managed to beat the market.
And if the market is largely efficient, it should be the case that a large fraction
of managers, at least, cannot simply beat the market hollow, right?
So what somebody did, this a typical study by Professor Burton Malkiel.
This is an older study but further studies also confirm evidence like this.
He basically took all mutual funds around at that time for a 20-year period.
And essentially,
stacked them in a histogram based on their Jensen's Alphas and what do you see?
You see that a majority of these Alphas are stacked around zero,
are concentrated around zero.
Now that shouldn't come as a surprise.
This should tie in with exactly the statement I made before that
markets are largely, indeed, efficient.
Now to be sure, I'm not saying that money cannot be made.
If you look on the far right of this graph, there is somebody who is two,
three standard deviations, close to three standard deviations above the mean.
And of course, on the extreme left, there was people who did really, really badly,
and they're three standard deviations close to below the mean.
So obviously, you have really, really good performers and really,
really bad performers.
But the key takeaway here is a large fraction of them bunch up around zero.
In other words, this is some sort of evidence that the market is indeed largely
efficient to the extent that it's not so easy to make money.
So now another representative piece of research,
especially slightly more recent research, is this paper by Daniel Grinblatt,
Titman and Wermers, which was published in 97.
And what they essentially do is they take a bunch of
known risk factors on the right-hand side, like the Farmer and
French risk factors, plus there are the momentum factors on the right-hand side.
And what they do is they essentially take virtually every fund in existence and
essentially benchmark the returns of each of these funds against these factors.
And what you see in the table are the alpha numbers.
What you see in the parentheses are the t-statistics.
And what you see really is that except for
a few numbers of none of them is statistically significant.
Which is to say, the alpha or average for the universe of mutual
fund managers is not really statistically significant.
In other words, mutual funds in aggregate are not beating the market.
Yes, in certain segments,
during certain time periods, mutual funds are beating the market.
Now again, this begs the old question, was this just skill or was this pure luck?
Now other pieces of evidence from research suggest that there is manager persistence,
not fund persistence.
In other words, the question has been asked, if a fund does well today,
this year, will it do well next year?
Well, it turns out the right question to ask is not the way I asked it just now.
You should ask the question as follows.
If a fund manager outperforms this year,
is it likely that he will outperform next year?
In other words, the fund manager could've switched jobs.
So the persistence is about the manager, rather than the fund.
The other thing they noticed in their paper, Chevalier and
Ellison, also try and examine the characteristics of managers which
make them better mutual fund managers.
They find that age matters.
Younger managers are better.
Managers with MBAs or better, so that's a big shout-out to all B schools out there.
And they also find that undergrad institution matters.
Now undergrad institution might simply be a proxy, and
I'm speculating here, for something like their SAT score, or
the sort of type of personality that a person might have, etc.
But certainly, these are the findings, right?
Now after all of this having been said and done,
if the average mutual fund manager doesn't beat the market and
if a large fraction of mutual fund managers don't beat the market, and
tying back to our initial part of the lecture, if markets are largely efficient.
And this having been proved through a battery of performance measures, then
the final question that one has to ask is, why should I invest in mutual funds?