A new academic paper was recently published with a confusing yet provocative title: Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?. Of course they do… right? An excerpt from the abstract:

Most common stocks do not outperform Treasury Bills. Fifty eight percent of common stocks have holding period returns less than those on one-month Treasuries over their full lifetimes on CRSP. […]

But everyone knows stocks return more than cash. How does this work? Taken altogether, stocks outperform cash. But if you picked any individual company, your results can vary from total bankruptcy to extraordinary wealth. The paper found that if you pick an individual company and held it over its lifetime, it would be more likely than not to underperform a 4-week T-Bill (classified as a cash equivalent). You can use the T-Bill as an approximate tracker of inflation.

Wes Gray points out at Alpha Architect that this idea has been explored before. Here’s a chart of the distribution of total lifetime returns for individual U.S. stocks. The research is done by Blackstar Funds, via Mebane Faber at Ivy Portfolio.

The U-shaped distribution shows that there are a lot of big losers and a lot of big winners. Actually some are huge winners. In the end, a small minority of stocks have been responsible for virtually all the market’s gains.

Here we see that out of the 26,000 stocks studied, these 10 stocks below have accounted for 1/6th of all the wealth ever created in the US stock market.

I should reiterate that these are lifetime returns, from when they appeared in the CRSP database until now or whenever they liquidated. Unless you bought these stocks essentially at IPO (or 1926 when the database starts), you probably didn’t get these returns. If you go out and buy a well-established company today, your distribution of returns will likely look different. You’d be less likely to go bankrupt but also less likely to make a 20,000% return.

If you take a step back, as Larry Swedroe points out, this means it is technically quite easy to outperform an index fund. You simply either (1) avoid investing in a few big losers or (2) invest extra in a few big winners. That’s it! Gotta be easy to filter out a few duds, right? Yet, the lack of outperformance on average by professional managers continues, and the managers that outperform can’t be predicted ahead of time. So you can keep looking for the needles in the haystack, or you can buy the whole haystack.

Howard Marks released another Oaktree memo earlier this month that somewhat coincides with this weekend’s Super Bowl. Inside, he revisited the New York Post NFL Bettor’s Guide, a panel of “experts” offering their opinion of winning picks for each NFL game during the season. The picks are relative to the point spread offered by the bookmakers. The experts further specify up to three “best bets” each week.

Here were the results after the 2015 NFL Season (from last year’s memo):

Here were the overall results after the 2016 NFL Season:

• The best picker was right 55.1% of the time.
• The worst picker was right 48.8% of the time.
• On average the pickers were right 51.6% of the time.

In terms of the “best bets” only:

• The best picker was right 62.7% of the time.
• The worst picker was right 43.1% of the time.
• On average the pickers were right 54.0% of the time.

Here’s my take on the observations in the memo:

All results cluster closely around 50/50. A blindfolded squirrel (or me flipping a coin) could easily blend in with this panel of “experts”. Some do a bit better than 50/50 (but not much better), while others do a bit worse (but not much worse). This is exactly what the distribution of a high number of coin tosses looks like. It’s very hard to consistently beat the point spread created by the “market” consisting of other bettors.

Don’t forget the vigorish. When you place a bet with a sports book, they charge a fee (“the vig”) for their services. For example, you may have to bet $110 to win $100. That translates to a roughly 5% commission on each bet. Even if you were right on average 54% of the time, you would still lose money in the long run after fees.

These are results from people who are paid to observe, analyze, and write about football games. Yet their performance could be mostly explained by luck, and even any slight outperformance on average is more than negated by fees.

In terms of investing, there are also many “experts” willing to offer their opinion on winning stock picks or other financial forecasts. Most will be average, or perhaps even slightly above average. However, history (and common sense math) shows that their performance won’t be good enough to offset the higher fees that they charge. In addition, there is no surefire way to find these above-average pickers ahead of time (using past performance doesn’t work). Due the presence of such fees, you can guarantee yourself “above average” net results by simply buying low-cost index funds.

I’m not one of those people that completely dismiss the possibility of skill in investing, but you if do want to go that route you should be realistic. If you’re picking your own stocks, keep an honest tab on your performance. If a mutual fund is charging 1.5% annually today to actively manage US stocks, it is rather unlikely that it will outperform a low-cost US stock index fund in the long term. On the other hand, an actively managed mutual fund that charges 0.15% annually and has various other positive factors has a more reasonable chance of slight outperformance. However, at the same time you must also accept the possibility of slight underperformance.

Jack Bogle is rightfully respected and there are probably over a hundred mentions of his name on this site. His message of common sense, simple, low-cost investing continues to spread since he first opened the Vanguard 500 Index fund to the public in 1975. Yet, he still has to keep pounding his drum because there is so much other noise out there. Similar to the sketches of NYT journalist Carl Richards, I present to you what I call the Bogle Appreciation Curve.

The overall shape of this curve can probably be applied to any field where there are classic fundamentals and then a bunch of fancy stuff on top. It definitely applies to investing, where there is an insatiable desire for something newer, better, and more complex.

Beginner Investor. You’re just starting out, and you read some recommended business books. There’s the classic Bogle on Mutual Funds and the much shorter one called The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (which you picked) by Bogle that really made sense and sounded reasonable. You see why low-costs and passive investing are based on common sense and basic mathematics. You understand why you should avoid high-cost, high-turnover funds sold by brokers.

Investor Who “Knows Things”. You read more about investing, learning about correlations and factors and portfolio optimization. This stuff is pretty interesting! Historically, if I bought a nice slug of “small-cap value” stocks, a bit of commodities, a sprinkle of gold, I would have higher returns with less volatility? I’d do even better with a momentum-following strategy, and now there is a smart beta ETF that will do it for me? It seems so easy to do better than a “vanilla” portfolio.

Jack Bogle says “smart beta is dumb”. Hmm, maybe he’s just not with the modern times anymore.

Older, Humbled Investor. Well, that was exhausting. The historically optimal portfolio in 1990 wasn’t the same as the historically optimal portfolio in 2000, and that was again true in 2010 and will be again in 2020. I missed out on part of the 2008-2016 surge because people told me the market was overvalued due to CAPE and PE10 and many other metrics. If I had just stayed the course through it all, I’d have done pretty good. I think someone told me to keep it simple. Who was it? Oh yeah, Jack Bogle. I need to re-read his books.

You can also keep up with John C. Bogle’s media appearances on his personal website. The updates serve as a nice, regular dose of Bogle wisdom.

As we close in on the end of the year, it is a good time to take stock of your investment portfolio. If you haven’t already, you should consider rebalancing your portfolio back towards your target asset allocation. Overall, this means selling your recent winners and buying more of your recent losers.

Now, you may think that rebalancing will improve your returns because you are “selling high” and “buying low”. However, the full picture is a bit more nuanced than that. If you think about it, the asset classes with the highest returns should eventually take over the portfolio if you never rebalance. If you started in 1965 with 50% stocks and 50% bonds and did nothing to 50 years, your portfolio in 2015 would have been overwhelmingly stocks. If you kept selling stocks and buying bonds, you would have probably lowered your returns in the long run. So why rebalance?

In his post How Portfolio Rebalancing Usually Reduces Long-Term Returns (But Is Good Risk Management Anyway), Michael Kitces provide a handy visual to summarize the effect of rebalancing into two scenarios:

1. When rebalancing between asset classes with similar returns, the likely effect is to help increase your overall returns while not affecting your risk. An example is rebalancing between US and International stocks.
2. When rebalancing between asset classes with different returns, the likely effect is to help lower your overall risk (improving your risk management in the chart) while decreasing your overall return. An example is rebalancing between stocks and bonds.

In the end, Kitces reminds us while your overall returns probably won’t be enhanced, the net effect of rebalancing is better risk management. I think of it similarly as preventing my portfolio from getting “out of control”. This is why people create “rebalancing bands” that let their portfolios wander a bit but not too much. For example, a 20% target allocation can vary from 15% to 25% before being rebalanced back towards the target number.

Here’s another post on the topic of creating good habits…

A common investing question is whether it is better to invest your money all at once (lump-sum) or gradually over time (dollar-cost averaging). The standard answer is that lump-sum is generally a better choice than dollar-cost averaging. This is mostly simple mathematics; If something goes up on average, then you’ll want your money in as early as possible.

However, in this Financial Planning magazine article Does investing monthly or annually beat a lump-sum portfolio? by Craig L. Israelsen, he argues that in the real world the best solution is regular, monthly investing. I recommend reading the original piece, but here is how I mentally broke down the concept:

1. The most important thing to building wealth is saving a lot of money (savings rate).
2. The best way to save a lot is to save often over time.
3. The best way to save often is to develop a regular habit of it, so that it becomes effortless over the years.
4. The hardest part about developing a habit is at the very beginning. You need an initial streak that is uninterrupted.
5. The most likely thing to interrupt your streak is seeing a big drop when you look at your monthly account statements. That is scary. As humans, we like to focus on that number.
6. With lump-sum contributions, you are much more likely to see a drop on a month-to-month basis. You have committed your money, and it is now subject to the market’s whims. You are also given a lot of time to think between actions, and you’ll have to muster up the motivation to make another lump-sum investment later.
7. With regular, monthly contributions and a small portfolio size, you will hardly ever see an account balance drop.

Historical data from 1980-2015. Consider a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds (details in the article). The following chart has three columns that compare overall market returns, an annual investment of $3,600 made each year on January 1st, and a monthly investment of $300 made at the start of each month.

In the beginning, your account balance “feels” like it is always growing, even though the market itself may be flat or even dropping. This is the benefit of regular, monthly contributions. The positive reinforcement will hopefully let an investing habit form. As your portfolio gets bigger, the difference between dollar-cost averaging and lump-sum investing becomes relatively insignificant.

Bottom line. Building the habit is the most important thing. If at all possible, you should make automatic, monthly investments. When your account is small, systematic investments make it more likely that the number on your monthly statement keeps rising every month. By the time that your portfolio starts to get big enough that it doesn’t help anymore, you’ll have already built the habit and be on the path to solid wealth. By the way, if you invest as soon as you have the money available (i.e. when you get your paycheck) then you already are getting your money in the market as soon as possible.

Here’s a very simple game that does a great job of illustrating the pitfalls of investing, despite the long-term odds being in your favor.

• Imagine that you are given $25 that you can bet on a coin toss for 30 minutes.
• You know that the coin will come up heads 60% of the time, and tails 40% of the time.
• You can bet as little or as much of your available cash on each flip. You double your wager if you are correct. You lose all of your wager if you are wrong.

There are many ways you could play this game. You could bet your entire $25 at once since you have an edge. But then there is a 40% chance you’d be instantly broke. You could bet nothing, as that would guarantee yourself $25 at the end of the session. You could vary your bets according to instinct. You could use mathematical theory to form an optimal solution.

Stock market investing works in a similar manner. People invest because the long-term odds are in our favor. Things look good over the long run, but there is volatility in the short run. Some people instead choose to take zero risk, but their money stagnates. Some people trade based on their intuition. Some people trade based on pre-set strategies.

The ideal result? If everyone bet optimally, they would have had a 95% chance of reaching 1000% of their initial wager (real-world maximum payout of $250). A mathematical formula called the Kelly Criterion tells you to bet a constant 20% of your bankroll every time. This is the optimal balance between the reward upside and keeping enough padding to avoid bankruptcy.

The actual results? The average ending balance was only $75. 33% of the participants actually lost money. 28% went completely broke! This comes from a research paper draft authored by Victor Haghani and Richard Dewey, who conducted this experiment on 61 “quantitatively trained test subjects” (appears to be finance workers that showed up for a hedge panel talk). Here’s a quote from the paper:

Given that many of our subjects received formal training in finance, we were surprised that the Kelly Criterion was virtually unknown and that they didn?t seem to possess the analytical tool-kit to lead them to constant proportion betting as an intuitively appealing heuristic. Without a Kelly-like framework to rely upon, we found that our subjects exhibited a menu of widely documented behavioral biases such as illusion of control, anchoring, over-betting, sunk- cost bias, and gambler?s fallacy.

That certainly sounds like real-world investing to me. Even in a situation with a clear advantage, people still mess it up all the time due to behaviorial and cognitive biases. People can argue whether volatility is a good proxy for risk, but the bottom line is that volatility in this game directly causes bad behavior. Big drops are always scary.

John Rekenthaler of Morningstar argues that the results of this experiment support the idea of auto-pilot investing.

My takeaways? Like this game, long-term investing is simple but not easy. You need to risk enough of your portfolio in order to expose yourself to the upside potential. However, you also need to keep enough safe such that you won’t flame out during a losing streak. I think that auto-pilot might work well in many situations, but people can also turn off autopilot in times of crisis if they don’t understand what’s “inside the box”. It’s best to calmly figure out an investment plan based on both market history and your personal situation, and then stick with it. Just winging it usually turns out poorly.