I also find myself pondering the macroeconomic effects of a lot of the market simply being in index funds, though I'm sure we're a long ways from that.
My personal rule-of-thumb "By the time you've heard of it, it's too late to get in on it" is also triggering, though I have to admit for the life of me I really can't imagine how to exploit this tendency. But I am anything but a financial wizard.
There are strategies to do this now, but they're hard to execute. One example is to target stocks that are likely to enter or drop off indicies. Index funds will be looking to buy or sell them soon.
Mostly these strategies depend on your ability to set up a very high speed link to the computers that clear trades and interpret the algorithms that index funds use to establish their samples of the market. If you can get in just ahead of the index funds and their monster volume, you can shave a few tenths of pennies from the investors.
You can make millions with those strategies but it's a drop in the index fund bucket. Quite a lot of "quant" trading activity is about ripping off ordinary people by unnoticed fractions by getting in ahead of them. Much more innocuous than the large scale bribery and fraud that makes up so much of the financial industry.
I think a lot of companies are setting up index funds now with high fees, because they know index funds have become a buzz word.
Always read the fine print.
If you want optimal as in mathematically optimal fund selection, then Bill Sharpe's startup, Financial Engines, does that (if you have at least $100k at Vanguard, you get it for free, also through many employers). https://personal.vanguard.com/us/insights/retirement/financi...
In general, index funds work. Some are better than others because of fees or their stock selection process. But they do work. The reason is that stocks in a sector have high covariance, and the outliers that might pop up occasionally with low covariance are only a small part of the index anyway. It is trivially easy to optimise on variance with some goal such as a limit on the number of holdings.
Actually, the people my employer go through just dumped Vanguard and a few other funds and would've automatically enrolled us all in a fund that changes every single year to be "optimum" for your age.
I opted out and I informed my coworkers that there were good reasons to be incredibly suspicious of this move, but I wonder who actually took my advice.
All I could think was that they were going to churn everyone's funds every single year so that they could get huge fees under the guise of "optimizing" our portfolios.
2 things to watch: fund expenses and composition
if churning is an issue, it will be reflected in the expense ratio. but if the expense ratio is comparable to actively-managed funds and the fund's composition is index funds, then it might be ok since you're only paying for management services once.
Anything that didn't generate enough fees got kicked out of the program (unless you opted out). Thankfully, I was in one of the safer funds (the only one currently showing a profit) before the crash. I wish I could move it over to Vanguard now, but it's too late. They didn't give us much warning, and they certainly gave us no time to switch, when we either had to opt out or get enrolled in their shiny new fee-generating fund.
That depends very much on exactly what you mean by "time the market".
It is impossible to reliably predict whether the market will go up or down on any given day. It is also impossible to reliably predict exactly when a market will hit a peak or trough. Dollar-cost averaging is a great strategy to reduce the risk associated with the inability to "time" markets in this sense.
But it is completely possible to recognize that a particular asset (or class) is over- or under-valued, as long as you have good enough information. You can't necessarily predict how long it will take for its value to be more accurately reflected in the price (another sense in which you "can't time the market"), but you can recognize that certain assets are on sale or commanding a premium price, and therefore get a good price on/for certain assets.
Portfolio rebalancing is, in part, meant to help capture this. Investing more in assets that have fallen behind, and less in those that have gotten ahead, is a (very rough) mechanism for selling high and buying low. Value investing is even more about this -- explicitly putting money into assets when it is cheap to do so, and selling assets that people are putting money into when it's expensive to do so. The idea is not to "time the market" in the sense of knowing exactly what day the market will turn, but simply to take advantage of really good deals (in the long-term sense) when they present themselves.
On the 30 year chart, the peaks on the 20-50% line are a couple percent above the peaks on the all line. Boosting returns from 7% to 9% over 30 years, or from 12% to 14% over 30 years, results in over 70% more total wealth after compounding. The visual difference is not as striking on the 30 year chart as on the 5 year chart, but that's because you're presenting annualized rather than total returns.
> During the decade of the 1980s, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index provided a very handsome total return (including dividends and capital changes) of 17.6 percent. But an investor who happened to be out of the market and missed just the ten best days of the decade—out of a total of 2,528 trading days—was up only 12.6 percent. [...] market timers risk missing the infrequent large sprints that are the big contributors to performance.
Invest in S&P 500 ETF (SPY) starting at inception
Growth of $100,000 from 1/29/1993-8/30/2010
Buy and Hold: $324,330.15
10 Best Days Removed: $156,354.12
10 Worst Days Removed: $692,693.90
10 Best and 10 Worst Days Removed: not listed, but very close to Buy and Hold (the green line in the chart)
I will note that the market is much different today than it was in 2004. Today HFT accounts for 70% of volume. That is huge. I think having an investing strategy that does not assume an asset will always go up is important.
> I am aware of many people that are successful traders.
You have to ask then if they own personal airplanes, yachts and private islands? If the answer is 'no', then you have to wonder why not?
I think the problem is that individual successful traders are just traders who are randomly successful. You hear about them because they are the ones that get lucky and brag about it. Those who are unsuccessful will probably remain forever anonymous to the public and even their friends.
The only ones that can "beat" the market are the ones that do it via technical means (minimum latency to the exchange, fastest computers, insider info, etc.) I think these are just the large investment banks.
> You have to ask then if they own personal airplanes, yachts and private islands? If the answer is 'no', then you have to wonder why not?
I am a software developer. Am I not successful because I dont own personal airplanes and a private island? I don't think these things define my success. Regardless, you have provided a straw man argument.
The people I know who are successful traders all have different MOs. What defines there success is that they stay in the black. Hence, they are able to time the market.
You don't need minimum latency to the exchange, fastest computers, insider info. As an example check out the performance of Fund My Mutual Fund. This is a virtual mutual fund that is soon to launch for real.
Now if you say you have found a way to beat the market through research, technical or fundamental analysis, your limit would be unbounded (theoretically). Your charts looks good and are very impressive, but it is only 2 years and you would not be showing them if they didn't do well. So for all I know you are just one of the random lucky ones that beat the market. Now if you had a way to consistenlty get 10% (and maybe you did!), in a decade or so you could be another Donald Trump. You need to convince others that you can do it and then soon you will start getting large investments.
> What defines there success is that they stay in the black. Hence, they are able to time the market.
If they can time the market, are they fully invested in it. Would they sell their house and get everyone they know to do the same so they can pour that into the market, then re-invest and eventually rule the world? Another way to ask the question is why haven't the big investment banks figured out the strategy, and as a result, diluted the strategy by now?
Also what about the ones that don't stay in the black. Will they tell you, would you know how many have tried and failed? That is the true criteria. You would have to have a large group of traders commited to making money in the market. Then they all try for a fixed amount of time and in the end you see how they perform as a group. Now, essentially, you are just pickding the ones that performed in the black and using that as an argument that invididual trading can be a 100% profitable business.