The Investment Scientist

Archive for February 2018

If you go to the Morningstar website to do research on a very popular fund, the Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund or VFINX, you may find this information after some digging around:

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The Investment Return is basically what the fund produces. (If the fund is a S&P 500 Index fund, then its investment return is basically synonymous to what the market produces.) The Investor Return is what the average fund investor receives. So why on earth would the typical investor get less than half of what the fund produces?

The answer is actually pretty simple: most investors just don’t have the mental wherewithal to stay in the market when it drops. They pulled out at the bottom of the market, thereby missing much of the rebound rally in 2009. See this fund flow chart below.

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