The difference between retail and institutional investors
Jan 24th, 2008 | Filed under: 130/30
They sure aren’t a silver bullet, but short-selling and using a bit of leverage is a proven way to give a manager more latitude to express her investment opinions. So it’s always interesting when the concept of 1X0/X0 is summarily dismissed because it’s “unproven” - like some screwy new market, or a derivative that most mortals can’t understand. The bottom line is that if investors in active funds believe in their managers’ ability to produce alpha - and supposedly they do or they wouldn’t invest with them - then why not give them more latitude (especially when that latitude has a hard cap)?
This article at Kiplinger.com is the latest to poke holes in 130/30 for the wrong reasons. The magazine that bills itself as “Timely, Trusted Personal Finance Advice…” dispenses some remarkable simplistic advice about 130/30 mutual funds. It starts like this:
“The mutual fund industry loves to adapt the hard-to-explain strategies of Wall Street for funds aimed at you and me. But sometimes these concepts can be so challenging that the real question is whether the funds are worth the hype. In most cases, probably not.”
You can guess how the piece goes on. But it’s how the story ends that says a lot about the kind of “trusted personal finance advice” being provided to people like you and me:
To continue reading this article please login (at the right) or click here to learn more about accessing our archives.
http://www.cxoadvisory.com/blog/external/blog1-24-08/
“In summary, presumably sophisticated hedge fund investors as a group chase past returns and fail to time their investments successfully.”
So, are the majority (dollar-weighted) of hedge fund investors “retail” or “institutional?” Just curious.
Very fair point, Bill. Hedge fund investors (many of them institutional) sure aren’t immune to return chasing. But based on my experience selling hedge funds to institutions, I’d say it’s a subconscious bias, not am explicit strategy (as we often see with mutual funds). Institutions will often take a year to make a decision and will stick with you for many more than that even if performance is poor. Still, I suppose whether the bias is subconscious or explicit doesn’t really make a difference at the end of the day. There are no points for good intentions. So thanks for keeping us honest.