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Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

wsj.com

41–50 of 496 posts

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#41
post #4

I'm curious if this is demonstrably an optimal strategy for individual investment too... I haven't had much success getting any clear data about whether active management demonstrably produces better results.

Active does better much better. If you know how the price moves you can easily beat the market.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#42
post #4

I'm curious if this is demonstrably an optimal strategy for individual investment too... I haven't had much success getting any clear data about whether active management demonstrably produces better results.

Active does better much better. If you know how the price moves you can easily beat the market.

Source?

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#43
post #4

I'm curious if this is demonstrably an optimal strategy for individual investment too... I haven't had much success getting any clear data about whether active management demonstrably produces better results.

The catch 22 for active management is that if they are actually good then they would just use their strategies to manage their own money.

They probably do. They just make it their day job by selling their services to others as well.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#44
post #11
post #4

I'm curious if this is demonstrably an optimal strategy for individual investment too... I haven't had much success getting any clear data about whether active management demonstrably produces better results.

Short answer re: investing in active managers (based on my many years listening to rationalreminder.ca) is that, if you eliminate some of the worst active managers, the average returns net of fees are the same. However, eliminating the worst managers is challenging (but not impossible) to do ex-ante. Even then, you’re only getting the same average returns as indexing, not better. Plus, you will experience a higher di…

> There’s strong evidence no individual trader can expect to beat the market.

I don't understand that. If you just bought Apple instead of SPY 20 years ago wouldn't you be doing great?

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#45
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer re: investing in active managers (based on my many years listening to rationalreminder.ca) is that, if you eliminate some of the worst active managers, the average returns net of fees are the same. However, eliminating the worst managers is challenging (but not impossible) to do ex-ante. Even then, you’re only getting the same average returns as indexing, not better. Plus, you will experience a higher di…

> There’s strong evidence no individual trader can expect to beat the market. I don't understand that. If you just bought Apple instead of SPY 20 years ago wouldn't you be doing great?

You do know there are thousands of stocks right. how many people dump their entire savings into one stock. 20 years ago you wouldn't have known apple was going on to do so well. If people did know it would have been bid up in price at the time

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#46
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer re: investing in active managers (based on my many years listening to rationalreminder.ca) is that, if you eliminate some of the worst active managers, the average returns net of fees are the same. However, eliminating the worst managers is challenging (but not impossible) to do ex-ante. Even then, you’re only getting the same average returns as indexing, not better. Plus, you will experience a higher di…

> There’s strong evidence no individual trader can expect to beat the market. I don't understand that. If you just bought Apple instead of SPY 20 years ago wouldn't you be doing great?

The key is that for every Apple, there are a ton of companies we don’t even remember the names of that went out of business or otherwise did not beat the SP500.

Put another way - if you can reliably pick the next Apple before anyone else, you should go work in finance and make tons of money.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this is a myth. You will not win the lottery without taking crazy amounts of risk. The active managers who do beat a major index for a long, long time almost do not exist in retail space, and they beat the market by a tiny amount (~1%). In my era Legg Mason was the most famous, but even they fell too.

How does that explain Warren Buffet’s spectacular success?

Buffet isn’t a passive investor. Berkshire Hathaway have often taken a very active role in the running of their acquisitions - appointing managers, setting strategy, merging/splitting off subsidiaries, etc. This is as much managing as investing. If Buffet was a pure stock picker, then he would be an interesting case in the active vs passive investment debate.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#48
post #4

I'm curious if this is demonstrably an optimal strategy for individual investment too... I haven't had much success getting any clear data about whether active management demonstrably produces better results.

But why stress about beating the market? Just be the market with an ETF that tracks the S&P 500 index. Literally, setup auto invest from your paycheck. Go to sleep (Rip van Winkel style). Wake up 40 years later and retire comfortably. Look at total returns over the last 40 years on the most popular indices in the world. S&P 500 crushes them all. I see a lot of "Internet advice" recommending various MSCI world indices…

Picking the S&P500 over a world index because you think it will outperform, has the same problem as picking individual stocks over an index. You can't actually know which will outperform in the future.

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#49
Completely off-topic. The article is paywalled, and for once I decided to go down the subscription rabbit hole. I am viewing this in Firefox on Windows. But every "subscribe" button on the WSJ page points to an Apple store page for the "app". WTF?!

Re: Nevada’s public employee pension fund invests passively and beats peers (2016)

#50
post #4

I'm curious if this is demonstrably an optimal strategy for individual investment too... I haven't had much success getting any clear data about whether active management demonstrably produces better results.

But why stress about beating the market? Just be the market with an ETF that tracks the S&P 500 index. Literally, setup auto invest from your paycheck. Go to sleep (Rip van Winkel style). Wake up 40 years later and retire comfortably. Look at total returns over the last 40 years on the most popular indices in the world. S&P 500 crushes them all. I see a lot of "Internet advice" recommending various MSCI world indices…

World indexes are normally somewhat less volatile (they’re typically _much bigger_; MSCI World is 1400 companies, and MSCI ACWI nearly 3000), which may be a useful attribute, depending on what you’re going for.

(Conversely, there are smaller indexes which tend to beat the S&P500, like the NASDAQ100, but there’s a volatility cost.)

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