Along with about 50 million others, I’m a product of Generation X. I had a Dorothy Hamill haircut, spent my weekends at the roller-skating rink, and grew up watching Madonna on MTV (back when she was more controversial and they actually aired videos). And while there are plenty of characteristics—not all of them positive—broadly attributed to the “slackers” and “latchkey kids” of my generation, we’re generally turning out OK.
There continues to be a lot of focus on the consequences of today’s low-rate environment. In such an environment, one of the most important things an investor can do is economize on the cost of the financial services they’re buying (translation: find lower expense ratio funds!).
Still, it never ceases to amaze me how much people continue to neglect the “silent killer” of long-term returns—high investment costs. Every now and then, I see articles that talk about the bite that investment costs can take out of a portfolio over time. But many times, these articles talk about how much of your “returns” an investment manager takes via fees. For example, if a fund charges a 1% fee and you anticipate a 5% gross return, it’s often observed that you’re giving up “20% of your return” (1% of the 5%) to costs. Jack Bogle likes to point out that the cost is dramatically higher when thought of as a percentage of after-inflation, after-tax returns: accounting for inflation of 2% and effective taxes of (say) 20% on the total return, your after-tax, “real” return is reduced to 2%, and a 1% fee is 50% of that!
A few months ago, my wife and I opened a small savings account for our young children to help teach them the power of saving. Compound interest. All that good stuff.
We talked about taking their pennies, dimes, and birthday checks from family and friends and depositing them down at the local savings institution. It’s always neat to see the coin machine sort all those round pieces of metal in a fraction of the time it used to take me to put them into paper rolls. (There used to be some long rainy days growing up.)
There’s been a lot of back and forth about the differences between the posted performance of a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) and the returns actually realized by investors taking into account cash flow.
Reading the discussion around this, you might come away with the impression that differences in these two ways of measuring returns are entirely the result of the timing (good or poor) of investors in terms of buying and selling. But what is often being ignored in such analyses is that differences between standard fund returns (so-called time weighted or lump-sum returns) and investor returns (a.k.a. internal rates of return or dollar-weighted returns) can be as much a function of the timing of returns as it is the timing of investors’ purchases or redemptions.
I recently had the chance to reread A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel as part of a work-related book club.
Having read the book in a business school class very early in my career, I promptly ignored its advice and became a securities analyst (a profession about which he makes a few disparaging remarks!) charged with analyzing companies and making buy-and-sell recommendations. I was guilty of most of the shortcomings Dr. Malkiel points to (for example, trying to pick winners), but at least I got to visit an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Read more »
