Morningstar Advisor - April/May 2012 - (Page 29)

In Practice Performance Chasing, Evaluated By Jeff Ptak Our research shows that three-year outperformance isn’t a great predictor, and maybe fund investors aren’t so fickle after all. “Everybody loves a winner.” That saying holds at least partly true for fund investors, who have tended to cast their lots with funds that have enjoyed recent success while fleeing laggards. Assets have flowed disproportionately at times to the “winners”—funds that have put up the best numbers in recent years. Some industry practices reinforce this dynamic. For example, “gatekeepers” are sometimes loath to recommend funds that have shorter track records and, thus, have not received a performance rating. What’s more, they might be reluctant to approve smaller funds for fear they have not achieved operational viability or lack distribution heft. In that sense, gatekeepers might be more prone to present investors a menu that skews to recent winners. This raises a few questions. First, are three-year returns—a common litmus test for defining “winners”—predictive of future performance? Second, with the rise of open-architecture platforms in recent years, have assets become more concentrated in winners? Third, to the extent that a category becomes more concentrated in its best performers, how are those winners likely to fare in subsequent periods? Our Study To address these questions, Morningstar Investment Services compiled net asset, Morningstar category, and return data for every active and obsolete U.S. open-end equity mutual fund in Morningstar’s database for the 19-year period ended Jan. 31, 2009. (Morningstar’s U.S. mutual-fund asset dataset is complete back to 1993, explaining why we commenced the study in that year.) We assembled peer groups for every single month of the study period using the historical Morningstar category classification data. In this way, we could better simulate the peer groupings that actually existed at each relevant time in the past. (Current category assignments do not necessarily represent a fund’s past classification; for example, today’s large-value fund could have been a mid-value fund last month, and so forth.) Using these point-in-time category snapshots and the historical return data, we calculated category percentile rankings based on each fund’s rolling three-year returns. We then tallied the assets invested in the different category quartile groups at each point in time, as well as the percentage of overall category assets that the quartile accounted for. For example, as of Jan. 31, 2008, there were 26 top-quartile large-growth funds. Taken together, those funds accounted for roughly $36 billion, or about 27%, of the category’s $137 billion in assets at the time. Is Past Prologue? To assess the predictiveness of three-year category percentile return rankings, we compared the ranking of each top-quartile fund with its ranking in the next nonoverlapping three-year period. For example, we compared a fund’s ranking for the three-year period ended June 30, 1998, with its ranking for the three years ended June 30, 2001, and so forth. We found that top-quartile funds in a given three-year period tended not to outperform in the immediately adjacent three-year period. In fact, the average top-quartile fund often underperformed. The lone exception was the small-growth category, where we found that the average top-quartile fund tended to meaningfully outperform its typical peer in subsequent periods, perhaps thanks to the wellchronicled “momentum effect,” though this trend has weakened in recent years. The bottom line is that we found scant evidence to suggest that three-year top-quartile return rankings, a commonly cited litmus test, are reliable predictors of future outperformance. MorningstarAdvisor.com 29 http://www.MorningstarAdvisor.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Morningstar Advisor - April/May 2012

Morningstar Advisor - April/May 2012
Contents
Contributors
Letter From the Editor
We’re Too Smart
How Do You Use Alternatives?
Taking the Lead
How to Find Economic Moats
The Beauty of Currencies
No Clarity on Bonds
Four Picks for the Present
Investment Briefs
Performance Chasing, Evaluated
Technology’s Slim Pickings
How Much Is Enough?
The Fear Bubble
Three Traits of a Successful Long-Short Equity Manager
Why Absolute-Return Funds Fail to Deliver
An Economist’s Response to Crises
Undiscovered in Plain Sight
Untangling ETF Tax- Efficiency Myths
Central Banks Driving the Gold Rush
U.S. Industrials Could Add Some Magic to Europe-Weary Portfolios
No-Hesitation Allocation Funds
Our Favorite Mutual Funds
50 Most Popular ETFs
Undervalued Stocks With Wide Moats
The Greatest Story Ever Told

Morningstar Advisor - April/May 2012