This may sound counterintuitive, but it's the basis of modern portfolio theory. The price that an investor should be willing to pay for an investment has to do with its beta to the broader market.
Think of it this way, imagine you could access the S&P 500 in a parallel universe. It has the same return characteristics as the normal S&P 500, but in any given year moves independently. How much does this improve your portfolio? Intuitively you'd think it's not worth anything. It's only as good as your current investments, so what's the point.
But in fact modern portfolio theory tells us that it's a huge improvement. Investing 50/50 in S&P and Bizarro-S&P, substantially improves the amount of return you can access for the same risk. That's because the two diversify each other, and the blend either reduces risk by 30% or lets you leverage up and increase expected returns by 30%.
You're saying, "maybe Melvin isn't a good investment, because it seems about equal to the S&P". But the point is an investment that's about equal to the S&P, yet uncorrelated to the S&P is massively valuable. Even if it has big drawdowns, you typically don't care as long as those drawdowns tend to occur during times when the rest of your portfolio is doing fine.
This is the same reason that a 60/40 stock-bond portfolio has massively outperformed 100% stocks historically. Even though bonds themselves return less than stocks.
What appears to be the case is they were edging the QQQ until they incinerated half their capital in a week on a bad bet and poor risk controls. So we now know they are uncorrelated with the S&P, but unfortunately we only know they are uncorrelated to the downside. (We don't know if their outperformance has been a result of real alpha or a strong market plus leverage.)
We saw a lot of these funds in the strong bull market of the 90s and the takeaway I remember was that it's impossible to know ahead of time who's going to blow up and lose all/most of your money.
T-Bills are virtually risk free, which is not the case of hedge funds, so why would you compare one with the other?
> But the point is an investment that's about equal to the S&P, yet uncorrelated to the S&P
How can you say that a hedge fund's return and the S&P are uncorrelated? They may not be identical but they are very strongly correlated.
T-bills are the performance benchmark for hedge funds but not the risk benchmark (which is generally something riskier). This can sound counterintuitive as T-bills are a very low hurdle to clear. However, in a downturn scenario generally causes rates to fall, increasing t-bill return when the rest of the market goes down. In that case its a very difficult hurdle to clear.
I can see how this would lower the volatility of your portfolio. But how do you improve the return in this scenario?
> This is the same reason that a 60/40 stock-bond portfolio has massively outperformed 100% stocks historically
How is this possible? If I invest 100% in stocks, my return after 10 years is higher than 60/40 stock-bond. So why do you say the latter outperforms it?
Leverage. You can translate reduced risk into greater returns by getting loans to invest more.
(You don't need to try and time the market for this to work. You can have a threshold so that you rebalance when you deviate from your target allocation more than X%)
Or in other words, show me the numbers.
According to https://www.justetf.com/en/etf-strategy-builder.html (click on "show simulation" and it will show the historical analysis) a 80/20 allocation slightly outperforms total stock over the last 20 years, while having lower volatility at the same time. I did not run the numbers myself.
Considering only the last 10 years seems pretty limited, as you are ignoring both the dot-com bust and the 2008 crisis.
Mixing bonds gives you a slightly higher safe withdrawal rate but you do lose 2 percentage points average yearly returns.
That is, if I started with $1 and made $1,000, a 50% loss would still be $500
- Unless you were late to the party. If you didn't get in the fund until (say) November, you have lost money.
(Edit: It's been reported elsewhere that these numbers are net of fees. However, it's entirely possible that for taxable accounts, tax considerations still narrow the performance gap. And of course, the QQQ offers instant liquidity and did not drop 53% this month.)
Either way, the money currently in there is very likely to underperform the indexes over the next 5 years (because they need to return 100% to get back to the pre-GME position).