By David Snowball

Dear friends,

They’ve done it again. After 32 years at Augustana, I’m still amazed and delighted each spring. For all that I grumble about their cell phone-addled intellects and inexplicable willingness to drift along sometimes, their energy, bravery and insistence on wanting to do good continue to inspire me. I wish them well and will soon begin to prepare for the challenges posed by my 33^rd set of first-year students.

But not right now. Right now, Chip and I are enjoying being in Scotland, being in each other’s company and being without cell service. Grand and languorous adventure awaits on islands and Highlands. While she and I are away, we’ve turned most of this month’s issue over to our colleagues though I did have time to write just a bit. And so…

Funds without fillers

Here are two simple truths:

1. Owning stocks makes sense because, over the long run, returns on stocks far outstrip returns on other liquid, publicly-accessible asset classes. Over the past 90 years, large cap stocks have returned 10% a year while government bonds have made 5-6%.

Sadly, that simple observation leads to this sort of silliness:

See? As long as your retirement is at least 87 years off, it’s silly to put your money anywhere other than common stocks. (The article’s author, a pharmacist and active investor, concludes that you shouldn’t trust mutual funds or ETFs but should, instead, be a do-it-yourself value investor. Uhhh … no thanks.) For those of us with a time horizon shorter than 87 years though, there’s a second truth to cope with.

2. Owning stocks doesn’t always make sense because the price of higher long-term returns is higher immediate volatility. That’s because stocks are more exciting than bonds. Frankly, no normal human ever said “yup, I got me some 30-year Ginnie Mae jumbos with a coupon of 3.5%” with nearly the same visceral delight as “yup, I got into Google at the IPO.” Maaaagic! That desire to own magic often enough leads investors to spend hundreds of dollars to buy shares which are earning just pennies a year. Good news leads to excitement, excitement leads to a desire to own more, that desire leads to a bidding war for shares, which leads to a soaring stock price, which leads to more bidding … and, eventually, a head-first tumble into a black hole.

GMO’s Ben Inker quantified the magnitude of the hysteria: “the volatility of U.S. since 1881 has been a little over 17% per year. The volatility of the underlying fair value of the market has been a little over 1%. Well over 90% of the volatility of the stock market cannot be explained as a rational response to the changing value of the stream of dividends it embodies” (“Keeping the Faith,” Quarterly Letter, 1Q 2016).

One reasonable conclusion, if you accept the two arguments above, is you should rely on stock managers who are not wedded to stocks. When we enter a period when owning stocks makes less sense, then your manager should be free to … well, own less stock. There are at least three ways of doing that: making bets that the market or particular sectors or securities will fall (long/short equity), shifting assets from overvalued asset classes to undervalued ones (flexible portfolios) or selling stocks as they become overvalued and holding the proceeds in cash until stocks become undervalued again (absolute value investing). Any of the three strategies can work though the first two tend to be expensive and complicated.

So why are long/short and flexible portfolios vastly more popular with investors than straightforward value investing? Two reasons:

1. They’re sexy. It’s almost like being invested in a hedge fund which, despite outrageous expenses, illiquidity, frequent closures and deplorable performance, is where all the Cool Kids hang out.
2. You demand managers that do something! (Even if it’s something stupid.) Batters who swing at the first pitch, and every pitch thereafter, are exciting. They may go down, but they go down in glory. Batters who wait for a fat pitch, watching balls and marginal strikes go by, are boring. They may get solid hits but fans become impatient and begin screaming “we’re not paying you to stand there, swing!” As the season goes on, batters feel the pressure to produce and end up swinging at more and more bad pitches.

In The Dry Powder Gang, Revisited (May 2016), we concluded:

[B]eing fully invested in stocks all the time is a bad idea. Allowing greed and fear, alternately, to set your market exposure is a worse idea. Believing that you, personally, are magically immune from those first two observations is the worst idea of all.

You should invest in stocks only when you’ll be richly repaid for the astronomical volatility you might be exposed to. Timing in and out of “the market” is, for most of us, far less reliable and far less rewarding than finding a manager who is disciplined and who is willing to sacrifice assets rather than sacrifice you. The dozen teams listed above have demonstrated that they deserve your attention, especially now.

One of those managers, Eric Cinnamond of ASTON River Road Absolute Value (ARIVX) wrote to take issue with our claim that cash necessarily serves as a drag on a portfolio. He writes:

This is another misconception about not being fully invested. If you have large discounts you can still generate attractive returns without being invested in what I call “fillers.” Just like with processed food, investment fillers are often there just to fill up the portfolio, but often provide little value and in some cases can be hazardous to your health! Open the hood of most fully invested small cap funds and you’ll find plenty of fillers these days, especially in sectors like consumer and health care. The stocks are clearly overvalued but managers think because they’re in lower risk sectors they won’t get destroyed. Good example WD-40 (WDFC) at 30x earnings! Great company but you could lose half your capital if it ever reverted to a more justifiable 7% free cash flow yield. 

That led us to the question, “so, how good are absolute value guys as stock-pickers.” That is, if you don’t feel compelling to buy “fillers” just for the optical value of a full-invested portfolio, how well do the stocks you find compelling perform?

Answer: really quite well. In the chart below, we look at the YTD performance of cash-heavy funds through early May. We then calculate how the stock portion of the portfolio performed, assuming that the cash portion was returning zero. For example, if a fund was 10% invested in stocks and had returned 1% YTD, we impute a stock return of 10% for that period.

	Style	Cash	2016 return, as of 5/6/16	Imputed active return
ASTON / River Road Independent Value ARIVX	Small-cap value	85	8.5	56.7
Intrepid Endurance ICMAX	Small-cap value	67	4.2	12.7
Hennessy Total Return HDOGX	Large-cap value, Dogs of the Dow	49	5.3	10.4
Intrepid Disciplined Value ICMCX	Mid-cap value	48	4.8	9.2
Castle Focus MOATX	Global multi-cap core	34	6.0	9.1
Pinnacle Value PVFIX	Small-cap core	47	4.2	8.9
Frank Value FRNKX	Mid-cap core	60	2.8	7.0
Cook & Bynum COBYX	Global large-cap core	37	4.3	6.8
Centaur Total Return TILDX	Equity-income	45	3.6	6.6
Bruce BRUFX	Flexible	26	2.5	3.4
Bread & Butter BABFX	Multi-cap value	42	1.3	2.2
FPA Crescent FPACX	Flexible	36	0.2	0.3
Chou Opportunity CHOEX	Flexible	22	(16.6)	(21.3)
Two plausible benchmarks
Vanguard Total Stock Market VTSMX	Multi-cap core	0	1	1
Vanguard Balanced Index VBINX	Hybrid	2	2.3	2.3

Two things stand out: first, the absolute value guys have, almost without exception, outperformed a fully invested portfolio during the year’s violent ups and downs. Second, the stocks in their portfolios have dramatically outperformed the stocks in a broad market index. Excluding the freakish Chou Opportunity fund, the stocks in the remaining twelve portfolio returned 10.6% on average while the Total Stock Market Index made 1%.

Bottom line: the demand for a fully-invested portfolio forces managers to buy stocks they don’t want to own. Judged by reasonable measures (risk-adjusted returns measured by the Sharpe ratio) over reasonable periods (entire market cycles rather than arbitrary 1/3/5 year snippets), you are better served by portfolios without fillers and by the sorts of managers we characterized as the “we’ve got your back” guys. Go check them out. The clock is ticking and you really don’t do your best work in the midst of a panic.

Wait! You can’t start a new bear market. We’re not done with the last one yet!

Many thoughtful people believe that the bull market that began in March 2009, the second oldest in 70 years, is in its final months. The S&P 500, despite periods of startling volatility, has gone nowhere in the year since reaching its all-time high on May 21, 2015; as I write on May 21, 2016, it sits 1% below that peak. It looks like this:

That’s bad: Randall Forsyth reports that no bull market in 30 years has gone so long without a new high (“Stocks Are Stuck in the Twilight Zone,” Barrons, 5/21/16). Of 13 bull markets since 1946 that have gone a year without a high, ten have ended in bear markets (“Clock ticks on bull market,” 5/20/16).

Meanwhile earnings have declined for a fourth consecutive quarter (and are well on their way to a fifth quarter). FactSet (5/20/16) notes we haven’t seen a streak that long or a quarterly drop so great since the financial crisis. The stock market is, in consequence, somewhere between “pricey” and “ridiculously pricey.” A new bear market may not be imminent (check with the Fed), but it will arrive sooner rather than later.

“But wait!” cries one cadre of managers, “we can’t have a new bear market yet. The old one hasn’t finished with us yet.”

That’s right. There are funds that still haven’t recovered their October 2007 levels. We screened the MFO Premium database, looking for funds that have spent the past 101 months still mauled by the bear.

We’ve found 263 funds, collectively holding $507 billion in assets, that haven’t recovered from the financial crisis. Put another way, $10,000 invested in one of these funds 3,150 days ago in October 2007 still isn’t worth $10,000.

Highlights of the list:

• Thirteen funds have managed double-digit annual losses since the start of the crisis. These are ranked from the greatest annualized loss down.

Direxion Monthly Emerging Markets Bull 2x (DXELX)
UltraEmerging Markets ProFund (UUPIX)
Guinness Atkinson Alternative Energy (GAAEX)
Midas (MIDSX)
Direxion Monthly 7-10 Year Treasury Bear 2x (DXKSX)
Mobile Telecommunications UltraSector ProFund (WCPIX)
ProShares Ultra Financials(UYG)
Rising Rates Opportunity ProFund (RRPIX)
Banks UltraSector ProFund (BKPIX)
UltraInt’l ProFund (UNPIX)
UltraJapan ProFund (UJPIX)
Calvert Global Energy Solutions (CAEIX)
Rydex Inverse Government Long Bond Strategy (RYJUX)

Ten of those funds could reasonably claim that they’re simple, mechanical trading vehicles which are designed for sophisticated (hah!) investors to hold for hours or a few days, not years. Three of the funds have no such excuse.

• Sixteen of the funds are double-dippers; they crashed in 2007-09 and then crashed even worse between 2009 and 2016. Technically we’re measuring a fund’s maximum drawdown, the greatest decline registered after it had begun to recover. Most of the double-dippers were leveraged equity, income or currency funds. Four funds managed the feat on (tremendously bad) luck and skill alone. Funds whose maximum drawdowns occurred after March 2009 include
  • Midas, down 88%, bottoming in December 2015
  • Calvert Global Energy Solutions, down 75% and Guinness Atkinson Alternative Energy, down 85%, both as of July 2012
  • Nysa, down 55% as of February 2016.
• One hundred ninety of the funds, around 72%, are international vehicles: 114 diversified international, 47 are emerging markets funds, 13 Europe-centered and 16 variously Asia-centered. There are no Latin American funds on the list.
• 78 of the funds are passive, quasi-passive or smart beta sorts of funds, including ETFs, ETNs, mechanical leveraged equity and enhanced index funds. The advisor that appears most frequently is iShares.
• Five simple domestic equity funds must take the Walk of Shame

AMG Managers Brandywine Advisors Mid Cap Growth (BWAFX), a mid-cap growth fund that’s lost 3.7% annually over the full market cycle.

Schneider Value (SCMLX) is a concentrated $20 million deep value fund that’s lost 1.2% annually, buoyed by a 15% return so far in 2016. It has a maddening tendency to finish way above average one year then crash for the next two.

Stonebridge Small Cap Growth (SBSGX) has lost 2.9% annually over the full market cycle but wins points for consistency: by Morningstar’s assessment, it has trailed at least 99% of its peers for the trailing 3, 5, 10 and 15 year periods.

Nysa (NYSAX), a small cap fund that would appall even Steadman. The fund’s not only lost 7.6% per year over the current market cycle, it’s lost over 50% in the 19 years since inception. In a hopeful move, the fund installed a new manager in February, 2013. He’s down 28% since then.

Jacobs Small Cap Growth (JSCGX) is the product of a bizarre marketing decision. In 2010, Jacob Investment Management decided to acquire Rockland Small Cap Growth Fund, a dying small cap fund with a terrible record and rechristen it as their own. The hybrid product is down 4.7% annually over the full market cycle. Since conversion, the fund has trailed its peers every year and appears to trail, well, all of them.

• 55 are multi-billion dollar funds. The Biggest Losers, all with over $10 billion in assets, are
  • Vanguard Total International Stock Index (VGTSX)
  • Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index (VEIEX)
  • iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (EEM)
  • Vanguard FTSE All-World ex US Index ETF (VEU)
  • Financial Select Sector SPDR (XLF)
  • iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF (EZU)

The most famous funds on the list include Janus Overseas (JNSOX), T. Rowe Price Emerging Markets Stock (PRMSX) and Fidelity Overseas (FSOFX), one of 12 Fido funds to earn this sad distinction.

The complete list of Bear Chow Funds is here.

One bit of good news for investors in these funds; others have suffered more. Three funds have waited more than 20 years to recover their previous highs:

Bottom line: if you own one of these funds, you need to actively pursue an answer to the question “why?” First why: why did I choose to invest in this fund in the first place? Was it something I carefully researched, something pushed on me by a broker, an impulse or what? That’s a question only you can answer. Second why: why does this fund appear to be so bad? There might be a perfectly legitimate reason for its apparent misery. If so, either a fund’s representative or your adviser owes you a damned straight, clear explanation. Do not accept the answer “everyone was down” any more than you’d accept “everyone cheats.” Not everyone was down this much and not everyone stayed down. And if, after listening to them bloviate a bit you start to feel the waft of smoke up your … uhh, nethers, you need to fire them.

Smart people saying interesting stuff

Josh Brown, “The Repudiation Phase of the Bubble,” 05/09/2016:

One of the common threads of every financial or asset bubble throughout human history is that they all have a repudiation phase – a moment where all the lies that had been built up alongside the excess are aired in public. Every reputation companies and players get caught up in it… We’re there now. New shit is coming to light every five minutes. Every reputation you thought was untouchable and every omission you’d accepted because it was already accepted by the crowd – all back on the table for discussion (dissection?).

Snowball’s note: for some reason, an old aphorism popped into my head as I read this. “The function of liberal Republicans (yes, there were such once) is to shoot the wounded after the battle.”

Cullen Roche, “A catastrophe looms over high-fee mutual funds and investment advisers,” 04/28/2016:

Back in 2009 I wrote a very critical piece on mutual funds basically calling them antiquated products that do the American public a disservice. I was generalizing, of course, as there are some fine mutual funds out there. However, as a generalization I think it’s pretty fair to say that the vast majority of mutual funds are closet-indexing leaches that do no one any good (except for the management companies who charge the high fees). But there are smart ways to be active and very silly ways to be active. Mutual funds are usually a silly way to be active as they sell the low probability of market-beating returns in exchange for the guarantee of high fees and taxes.

Dan Loeb is right. A catastrophe is coming. The end of an era is here. And the American public is going to be better off because of it.

Snowball’s note: “the vast majority are …” is absolutely correct. The question for me is whether really worthwhile funds will stubbornly insist on self-destructing because (1) the managers are obsessed about talking about raw performance numbers and (2) firms would rather die on their own terms rather than looking for ways to collaborate with other innovators to redefine the grounds of the debate.

Had I mentioned my impending encounter with Cullen Skink (no relation), a sort of Scottish fish chowder?

Meb Faber, “Which Institution Has the Best Asset Allocation Model?” 05/18/2016. After analyzing the recommended asset allocations of the country’s 40 top brokerages and comparing their results over time, Faber fumes:

Bob Cochran’s Thinking beyond funds

We were delighted to announce last month that Bob Cochran joined MFO’s Board of Directors. Bob is the lead portfolio manager, Chief Compliance Officer, and a principal of PDS Planning in Columbus, Ohio, and a long-time contributor to the FundAlarm and MFO discussion boards.

The Observer strives to help two underserved groups: small independent investors and small independent managers. In an experiment in outreach to the former group, and most especially to younger, less confident investors, Bob has agreed to write a series of short articles that help people think beyond funds. That aligns nicely with Meg Faber’s recommendation, above, and with both Bob and Sam Lee’s approach to their clients. All agree that your investments are an important part of your financial life, but they don’t drive your success on their own. Here’s Bob’s first reminder of stuff worth knowing but often overlooked.

They Are Just Documents. How Important Can They Be?

Take a moment and think about what could happen if you were to suddenly become physically or mentally unable to handle your affairs. Young, old, single, married, in a committed relationship or not: the fact is unless you have certain documents in place, your financial and health well being could be in limbo. Everyone should have the following documents created, executed, and ready should they be needed.

• Durable Power of Attorney, sometimes called a financial power of attorney. This designates someone to act on your behalf should you be unable to pay bills and make other financial decisions. This allows your designee access to bank accounts, brokerage accounts, and retirement accounts (the latter only if specifically stated in the document), and the authority to make deposits, withdrawals, and pay bills, and allow access to any safe deposit boxes.
• Health Care Power of Attorney, also called a Health Care Directive or Medical Power of Attorney. This document allows your designee the authority to make health care decisions. In some states, this can be what is called a Springing Power of Attorney that takes effect only after your incapacity.

If you do not have these two documents, think of the problems that could arise should you become unable to handle your financial affairs or make health care decisions by yourself. How will your ongoing bills be paid? Who will respond to doctors and health care providers on your behalf? The time and money to have the courts make a ruling could be significant, and that does not ensure it is consistent with your wishes.

Both documents are easily created by your attorney, or you may find them online, specifically for the state in which you live. Generally, your spouse would be named as POA if you are married. If you are single, a parent, relative, or close friend are often selected. Remember the person you name will have broad powers, so be sure it is someone you trust. And be sure you provide a copy of the documents to the person you have named as POA.

Tragedies happen all the time. They are seldom anticipated. We have had clients who have spent money getting these documents created, but have never signed them. This is a huge mistake! Take action today to make sure you live your life on your own terms. After all, it’s your life, plan for it.

On Financial Planners

A family friend recently asked me to look at his mutual fund investments. He contributes to these investments periodically through his colleague, a Certified Financial Planner at a long-time neighborhood firm that provides investment services. The firm advertises it’s likely more affordable than other firms thanks to changes in how clients are billed, so it does not “charge hefty annual advisor fees of 1% or more.”

I queried the firm and planner on FINRA’s BrokerCheck site and fortunately found nothing of concern. FINRA stands for Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and is a “not-for-profit organization authorized by Congress to protect America’s investors by making sure the securities industry operates fairly and honestly.”

A couple recent examples of its influence: FINRA Fines Raymond James $17 Million for Systemic Anti-Money Laundering Compliance Failures and FINRA Sanctions Barclays Capital, Inc. $13.75 Million for Unsuitable Mutual Fund Transactions and Related Supervisory Failures.

The BrokerCheck site should be part of the due-diligence for all investors. Here for example is the type of allegations and settlements disclosed against the firm Edward Jones in 2015: “The firm was censured and agreed to pay $13.5 million including interest in restitution to eligible customers … that had not received available sales charge waivers … since 2009, approximately 18,000 accounts purchased mutual fund shares for which an available sales charge waiver was not applied.”

And, here an example of experience listed for an “Investment Adviser Representative” …

But I’m getting sidetracked, so back to my friend’s portfolio review.  Here’s what I found:

• He has 5 separate accounts – 2 Traditional IRAs, 2 Roth IRAs, and one 529.
• All mutual funds are American Funds, accessed directly through American Funds website.
• He owns 34 funds, across the 5 accounts.
• Adjusting for different share classes (both front-loaded A, and back-loaded B … no longer offered), he owns 8 unique funds.
• The 8 “unique” funds are not all that unique. Many hold the very same stocks. Amazon was held in 6 different funds. Ditto for Phillip Morris, Amgen, UnitedHealth Group, Home Depot, Broadcom, Microsoft, etc.
• The 8 funds are, in order of largest allocation (A class symbols for reference): Growth Fund of America (AGTHX), Capital World Growth & Income (CWGIX), Capital Income Builder (CAIBX), American Balanced (ABALX), AMCAP (AMCPX), EuroPacific Growth (AEPGX), New Perspective (ANWPX), and New Economy (CNGAX).

After scratching my head a bit at the sheer number of funds and attendant loads, annual expense ratios, and maintenance fees, I went through the exercise of establishing a comparable portfolio using only Vanguard index funds.

I used Morningstar’s asset allocation tool to set allocations, as depicted below. Not exact, but similar, while exercising a desire to minimize number of funds and maintain simple allocations, like 60/40 or 80/20. I found three Vanguard funds would do the trick: Total Stock Market Index 60%, Total International Market Index 20%, and Total Bond Index 20%.

The following table and corresponding plot shows performance since November 2007, start of current market cycle, through April 2016 (click on image to enlarge):

As Mr. Buffet would be quick to point out, those who simply invested in the Total Stock Market Index fund received the largest reward, if suffering gut-wrenching drawdown in 2009. The Total Bond Index rose rather steadily, except for brief period in 2013. The 60/40 Balanced Index performed almost as well as the Total stock index, with about 2/3 the volatility. Suspect such a fund is all most investors ever need and believe Mr. Bogle would agree. Similarly, the Vanguard founder would not invest explicitly in the Total International Stock fund, since US S&P 500 companies generate nearly half their revenue aboard. Over this period anyway, underperformance of international stocks detracted from each portfolio.

The result appears quite satisfying, since returns and volatility between the two portfolios are similar. And while past performance is no guarantee of future performance, the Vanguard portfolio is 66 basis points per year cheaper, representing a 5.8% drag to the American Funds’ portfolio over an 8.5 year period … one of few things an investor can control. And that difference does not include the loads American Funds charges, which in my friend’s case is about 3% on A shares.

My fear, of course, is that while this Certified Financial Planner may not directly “charge hefty annual advisor fees,” my friend is being directed toward fee-heavy funds with attendant loads and 12b-1 expenses that indirectly compensate the planner.

Inspired by David’s 2015 review of Vanguard’s younger Global Minimum Volatility Fund (VMVFX/VMNVX) I made one more attempt to simplify the portfolio even more and reduce volatility, while keeping global exposure similar. This fund’s 50/50 US/international stock split combined with the 60/40 stock/bond split of the Vanguard Balanced Fund, produces an even more satisfying allocation match with the American Funds portfolio. So, just two funds, each held at 50% allocation.

Here is updated allocation comparison: 

And here are the performance comparison summary table and plot from January 2014 through April 2016, or 2.33 years (click image to enlarge):

I should note that the Global Volatiliy Fund is not an index fund, but actively managed by Vanguard’s Quantitative Equity Group, so this portfolio is also 50/50 passive/active. While the over-performance may temper, lower volatility will persist, as will the substantially lower fees.

Other satisfying aspects of the two comparable Vanguard portfolios are truly unique underlying holdings in each fund and somewhat broader exposure to value and mid/small cap stocks. Both these characteristics have shown over time to deliver premiums versus growth and large cap stocks.

Given the ease at which average investors can obtain and maintain mutual fund portfolios at Vanguard, like those examined here, it’s hard to see how people like my friend will not migrate away from fee-driven financial planners that direct clients to fee-heavy families like American Funds.

Every Active Fund is a Long-Short Fund: A Simple Framework for Assessing the Quality, Quantity and Cost of Active Management

By Sam Lee

Here’s a chart of the 15-year cumulative excess return (that is, return above cash) of a long-short fund. Over this period, the fund generated an annualized excess return of 0.82% with an annualized standard deviation of 4.35%. The fund charges 0.66% and many advisors who sell it take a 5.75% commission off the top.

Though its best returns came during the financial crisis, making it a good diversifier, I suspect few would rush out to buy this fund. Its performance is inconsistent, its reward-to-risk ratio of 0.19 is mediocre, and its effective performance fee of 44% is comparable to that of a hedge fund. There are plenty of better-performing market-neutral or long-short funds with lower effective fees.

Despite the unremarkable record, about $140 billion is invested in a version of this strategy under the name of American Funds Growth Fund of America AGTHX. I simply subtracted the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s monthly total return from AGTHX’s monthly total return to create the long-short excess return track record (total return would include the return of cash).

This is an unconventional way of viewing a fund’s performance. But I think it is the right way, because, in a real sense, every active fund is a long-short strategy plus its benchmark.

Ignoring regulatory or legal hurdles, a fund manager can convert any long-only fund into a long-short fund by shorting the fund’s benchmark. He can also convert a long-short fund into a long-only fund by buying benchmark exposure on top of it (and closing out any residuals shorts). I could do the same thing to any fund I own through a futures account by overlaying or subtracting benchmark exposure.

Viewing funds this way has three major benefits. First, it allows you to visualize the timing and magnitude of a fund’s excess returns, which can alter your perception of a fund’s returns in major ways versus looking at a total return table or eyeballing a total return chart. Looking at a fund’s three-, five- and ten-year trailing returns tells you precious little about a fund’s consistency and the timing of its returns. The ten-year return contains the five-year return which contains the three-year return which contains the one-year return. (If someone says a fund’s returns are consistent, citing 3-, 5-, and 10-year returns, watch out!) Rolling period returns are a step up, but neither technique has the fidelity and elegance of simply cumulating a fund’s excess returns.

Second, it makes clear the price, historical quantity and historical quality of a fund’s active management. The “quantity” of a fund’s active management is its tracking error, or the volatility of the fund’s returns in excess of its benchmark. The “quality” of a fund’s management is its information ratio, or excess return divided by tracking error. Taking these two factors into consideration, it becomes clearer whether a fund has offered a good value or not. A fund shouldn’t automatically be branded expensive based on its expense ratio observed in isolation. I would happily give up my left pinky for the privilege of investing in Renaissance Technologies’ Medallion fund, which charges up to 5% of assets and 44% of net profits, and I would consider myself lucky.

Finally, it allows you to coherently assess alternative investments such as market-neutral funds on the same footing as long-only active managers. A depressingly common error in assessing long-short or market neutral funds is to compare their returns against the raw returns of long-only funds or benchmarks. A market neutral fund should be compared against the active component of a long-only manager’s returns.

To make these lessons concrete, let’s perform a simple case study with two funds: Vulcan Value Partners Small Cap VVPSX and Vanguard Market Neutral VMNFX. Here’s a total return chart for both funds since the Vulcan fund’s inception on December 30, 2009. (Note that Vanguard Market Neutral was co-managed by AXA Rosenberg until late 2010, after which Vanguard’s Quantitative Equity Group took full control.)

Given the choice between the two funds, which would you include in your portfolio? Over this period the Vanguard fund returned a paltry 3.7% annually and the Vulcan fund a blistering 14.2%. If you could only own one fund in your portfolio, the Vulcan fund is probably the better choice as it benefits from exposure to market risk and therefore has a much higher expected return. However, if you are looking for the fund that enhances the risk-adjusted return of portfolio, there isn’t enough information to say at this point; it is meaningless to compare a fund with market exposure with a market neutral fund on a total return basis.

A good alternative fund usually neutralizes benchmark-like exposure and leave only active, or skilled-based, returns. A fairer comparison of the two funds would strip out market exposure from Vulcan Small Cap (or, equivalently, add benchmark exposure to Vanguard Market Neutral). In the chart below, I subtracted the returns of the Vanguard Small Cap Value ETF VBR, which tracks the CRSP US Small Cap Value Index, from the Vulcan fund’s returns. While the Vulcan fund benchmarks itself against the Russell 2000 Value index, the Russell 2000 is terribly flawed and has historically lost about 1% to 2% a year to index reconstitution costs. Small-cap managers love the Russell 2000 and its variations because it is a much easier benchmark to beat. Technically, I’m also supposed to subtract the cash return (something like the 3-month T-bill or LIBOR rate) from Vanguard Market Neutral, but cash yields have effectively remained 0% over this period.

When comparing both funds simply based on their active returns, Vanguard Market Neutral Fund looks outstanding. Investors have paid a remarkably low management fee (0.25%) for strong and consistent outperformance. Even better, the fund’s outperformance was not correlated with broad market movements.

This is not to say that Vanguard has the better fund simply based on past performance. Historical quantitative analysis should supplement, not supplant, qualitative judgment. The quality of the managers and the process have to be taken into account when making a forecast of future outperformance as a fund’s past excess return is very loosely related to its future excess return. There is a short-term correlation, where high recent excess return predicts high future near-term excess return due to a momentum effect, but over longer horizons there is little evidence that high past return predicts high future return. Confusingly, low long-run excess returns predict low future returns, suggesting evidence of persistent negative skill. If a fund has historically displayed a long-term pattern of low active exposure and negative excess returns, its fees should either be extremely low or you shouldn’t own it at all.

—–

There’s a puzzle here. Imagine if Vanguard Market Neutral’s managers simply overlaid static market exposure on their fund. Here’s how their fund would have performed. A long-only fund that has beaten the market by 3.7% a year with minimal downside tracking error over five years would easily attract billions of dollars. But here Vanguard is, wallowing is relative obscurity, despite having remarkably low absolute and relative costs.

Why is this? In theory, the price of active management—in whatever form—should tend to equalize in a competitive market. However, what we see is that long-only active management tends to dominate and is often wildly expensive relative to the true exposures offered, and long-short active management tends to often repackage market beta and overcharge for it, creating pockets of outstanding value among strategies that are truly market neutral and highly active.

I think three forces are at work:

• Investors do not adjust a fund’s returns for its beta exposures. A high return fund, even if it’s almost from beta, tends to attract assets despite extremely high fees for the actively managed portion.
• Investors focus on absolute expense ratios, often ignoring the level of active exposure obtained.
• Investors are uncomfortable with unconventional strategies that use leverage and derivatives and incur high tracking error.

Given these facts, a profit-maximizing fund company will be most rewarded by offering up closet index funds. Alternative managers will offer up market beta in a different form. Active managers that offer truly market neutral exposure will be punished due to their unconventionality and comparisons against forms of active management where beta exposures are baked into the track record.

Investment Implications

When choosing among active strategies, all sources of excess return should be on a level playing field. There is no reason to compare long-only active managers against other long-only active managers. Your portfolio doesn’t care where it gets its excess returns from and neither should you.

However, because investors tend to anchor heavily on absolute expense ratios, the price of active management offered in a long-only format tends to be much more expensive per unit of exposure than in a long-short format. An efficient way to obtain active management while keeping tracking error in check is to construct a barbell of low-cost benchmark-like funds and higher-cost alternative funds.

The Education of a Portfolio Manager

By Leigh Walzer

Like 3 million of his peers, my son will graduate college this spring. In the technology space many of the innovative companies seem to care less about which elite institution is named on his piece of sheepskin and more about the skillset he brings to the role.

Asset management companies and investors entrusting their money to fund managers might wonder if the guys with fancy degrees actually do better than the rest of the pack.

There is an old adage that that the A students work for the C students. I remember working for Michael Price many years ago. Michael was a proud graduate and benefactor of the University of Oklahoma. He sometimes referred to my group (which did primarily distressed debt) as “the Ivy Leaguers.”

Graduates of Stanford and Harvard outperformed their peers by 1% per year for the past three years.

Thanks to the Trapezoid database, we were able to compile information to see if the Ivy Leaguers (like my son) actually perform better. Our laboratory is the mutual fund universe. We looked at 4000 funds managed by graduates of 400 universities around the world. We focused for this study on results for the three years ending April 30, 2016.

A few caveats: We concede to purists and academics that our study lacks rigor. The mutual fund database does not capture separate accounts, hedge funds, etc. We excluded many funds (comprising 25% of the AUM in our universe) where we lacked biographical data on the manager. Successful active funds rely on a team so it may be unfair to ascribe success to a single individual; in some cases we arbitrarily chose the first named manager. We used the institution associated with the manager’s MBA or highest degree. Some schools are represented by just 1 or 2 graduates. We combined funds from disparate sectors. Active and rules-based funds are sometimes strewn together. We haven’t yet crunched the numbers on the value of CFA certification. And we draw comparisons without testing for statistical validity.

I was a little surprised at the mix of colleges managing the nation’s mutual funds. Villanova has an excellent basketball program. But I didn’t expect it to lead the money manager tables. However, nearly all the funds managed by Villanova were Vanguard index funds. The same is true for Shippensburg, St. Joseph’s, Lehigh, and Drexel.

When we concentrated on active funds, the leading schools were Harvard, Wharton, Columbia University, University of Chicago, and Stanford. Note that Queens College cracks the top 10 – this is attributable almost entirely to one illustrious grad: Dina Perry, a money manager at Capital Re.

Who performed the best over the last 3 years? By one measure, Stanford graduates did the best followed by Harvard, Queens College, Dartmouth, and University of Wisconsin. Trapezoid looks mainly at each manager’s skill from security selection. Institutions managing fewer assets have a higher bar to clear to make the list. Managers from these top five schools ranked, on average, in the 77th percentile (100 being best) in their respective categories in skill as measured by Trapezoid.

Exhibit III: Fund Analysis Report for TRAIX

If size and sample size were disregarded, some other colleges would score well. Notably, Hillsdale College benefitted from very strong performance by David Giroux, manager of the T Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Fund (TRAIX – closed to new investors). Wellington’s Jean Hynes lifted Wellesley College to the top echelon. Strong international programs include University of Queensland and CUNEF.

I searched in vain for an alum of Professor Snowball’s Augustana College in our database. Bear in mind though that any Viking who went on to earn a post-graduate degree elsewhere will show up under that school. (Snowball’s note: Augie is a purely undergraduate college and most managers accumulate a grad degree or three, so we’d be invisible. And the only fund manager on our Board of Trustees, Ken Abrams at Vanguard Explorer VEXPX, earned both his degrees at that upstart institution in Palo Alto.)

By and large it doesn’t cost investors more to “hire” graduates of the leading schools. The average fee for active managers at these five schools is 69 bps compared with 87 bps for the overall universe.

It seems remarkable that graduates of Stanford and Harvard outperformed their peers by 1% per year for the past three years. If we add Chicago and Wharton (the next two highest ranked MBA institutions), the advantage for the elite graduates falls to 0.47%. If we expand it to include the 10 universities (as ranked by US News & World Report) the advantage falls to 30bps.

We confess we are a bit surprised by these findings. We wonder how efficient market proponents like Burton Malkiel and Jack Bogle would explain this. (Graduates of their institution, Princeton University, also outperformed the market by 1%.)

If we were recruiting for a mutual fund complex, we would focus on the leading MBA programs. Judging by the numbers many asset managers do precisely that; Over 20% of all active mutual fund managers come from these schools

Does it mean that investors should select managers on the basis of academic credentials? If the choice were between two active funds, the answer is yes. If the choice is between a fund managed actively managed by a Stanford MBA and a passive fund, the answer is less clear. We know for the past 3 years the return produced by a typical Stanford MBA adjusted for the portfolio’s characteristics exceeds expense. But we would need to be fairly confident our stable of well-educated managers would repeat their success over the long haul by a sufficient margin.

Trapezoid’s fundattribution.com website allows registered users to review funds to see whether skill is likely to justify expense for a given fund class. We do this based on a probabilistic analysis which looks at the manager’s entire track record, not just the three-year skill rating. MFO readers may register at www.fundattribution.com for a demo and see the probability for funds in certain investment categories.

Interestingly the school whose fund managers gave us the highest confidence is Dartmouth. But we wouldn’t draw too strong conclusion unless Dartmouth has figured out how to clone its star, Jeff Gundlach of DoubleLine.

Bottom Line:

Graduates of top schools seem to invest better than their peers. Our finding may not be surprising, but it contradicts the precept of efficient market theorists. Knowing the fund manager graduated a top school or MBA program is helpful at the margin but probably not sufficient to choose the fund over a low-cost passive alternative.

Elevator Talk: Goodwood SMid Cap Discovery (GAMAX/GAMIX)

Since the number of funds we can cover in-depth is smaller than the number of funds worthy of in-depth coverage, we’ve decided to offer one or two managers each month the opportunity to make a 200 word pitch to you. That’s about the number of words a slightly-manic elevator companion could share in a minute and a half. In each case, I’ve promised to offer a quick capsule of the fund and a link back to the fund’s site. Other than that, they’ve got 200 words and precisely as much of your time and attention as you’re willing to share. These aren’t endorsements; they’re opportunities to learn more.

Goodwood SMid Cap isn’t your typical small-to-mid cap fund. In 2013, the manager of Caritas All-Cap Growth Fund (CTSAX) decided he’d had enough and left, leading the Board to order the fund’s closure and liquidation. I paraphrased their logic this way: “our fund is tiny, expensive, bad, and pursues a flawed investment strategy (long stocks, short ETFs). We’ll be going now.” Then, after liquidating all of the fund’s holdings, the Board put a stop to the action, appointed a transition manager and two months later sold the fund (and its record) to Goodwood.

The new manager moved it from all-cap growth with shorting via ETFs to small-to-mid cap value. According to one recent interview, the fund was originally a long-only product which has only recently added several hedging options. Managers Ryan Thibodeaux and Josh Pesses have a portfolio of 50-70 stocks with distinct biases toward smaller cap companies and value rather than growth. They’re able to hedge that portfolio with up to 20 short positions, cash, and a mix of puts and call options. Currently the fund’s net market exposure is 75%, which about 40% of the portfolio invested in small- to micro-cap stocks.

Mr. Thibodeaux founded Goodwood in 2012 after a nine year stint with Maple Leaf LP, a hedge fund that received a “seed” investment from Julian Robertson’s famous Tiger Management, leading to the informal designation of Maple Leaf as a “Tiger Seed.” Maple Leaf, like Goodwood, was a fundamental, value-biased long/short fund. Mr. Pesses joined Goodwood about a year later. Like Mr. Thibodeaux he was at Maple Leaf, served as a Partner and Senior Equity Research Analyst from 2007 to 2012. Their first products at Goodwood were long/short separate accounts which have done remarkably well. From January 1, 2008 – March 31, 2016, their long/short composite returned 8.6% annually after fees. The average Morningstar peer made 0.7%. That seems like a hopeful sign since those same strategies should help buoy GAMAX.

That said, performance has still been rocky. From the day Goodwood took over the fund (10/01/13) to 05/21/16, GAMAX has lost a bit over 6% while Morningstar’s small-blend category is up 7.3%. In 2015, the fund trailed 100% of its peers but so far in 2016, it’s returned 14.2% and is in the top 1% of its peer group. That sort of divergence led us to ask Messrs. Thibodeaux and Pesses to talk a bit more about what’s up. Here are their 200 (well, okay, 261 but that’s still only 130.5 per manager) words on why you need Goodwood:

There is not much about our firm and the Goodwood SMID Cap Discovery Fund that one would call conventional. From our background, to a geographic location that puts us well off the beaten path, to our atypical entree into the 40 Act world, to our investment strategy – we don’t fit neatly into any one box, Morningstar or otherwise.

When we took an over as manager to an existing mutual fund in October 2013, it was our first foray into the open-end side of the investment business. Up to that point, we’d spent the bulk our careers as analysts at a long/short hedge fund. That experience influences the way we approach stock selection and portfolio construction today and is a differentiator in the 40 Act space.

Our investment process is driven by a fundamental value-based approach, but that is not what sets our work apart. We see flexibility as a hallmark of our more “opportunistic” approach to investing. We invest in the sectors, both long and short, that we have covered for our entire careers – Consumer, Healthcare, Industrials and Technology. We are agnostic to benchmark weightings and when opportunities are scarce, we are comfortable with high cash balances. The Fund is and will always be long-biased, but we actively hedge our exposure using options and look at add alpha where possible through short selling individual securities.

Ultimately, our goal is to achieve superior risk adjusted returns over the intermediate to long term and we believe the Fund can serve as a valuable complement to core or passive Small and Mid cap positions.

The minimum initial investment for GAMAX is $2,500 with an expense ratio of 1.95%. The minimum investment for the institutional shares is $100,000; those shares carry a 1.7% E.R. Here’s the Goodwood website, it’s one of those fancy modern ones that doesn’t facilitate links to individual pages so you’ll have to go and click around a bit. If you’re interested in the strategy, you might choose to read through some of the many articles linked on their homepage.

Launch Alert: Centerstone Investors Fund (CETAX/CENTX)

Centerstone Investors and its sibling Centerstone International (CSIAX/CINTX) launched on May 3, 2016. The Investors fund will be a 60/40-ish global hybrid fund. Their target allocation ranges are 50-80% equity, 20-40% fixed income and 5-20% cash. Up to 20% of the fund might be in high-yield bonds. They anticipate that at least 15% of the total portfolio and at least 30% of their stocks will be non-U.S.

The argument for being excited about Centerstone Investors is pretty straightforward: it’s managed by Abhay Deshpande who worked on the singularly-splendid First Eagle Global (SGENX) fund for 14 years, the last six of them as co-manager. He spent a chunk of that time working alongside the fund’s legendary manager, Jean-Marie Eveillard and eventually oversaw “the vast majority” of First Eagle’s $100 billion. SGENX has a five star rating from Morningstar. Morningstar downgraded the fund from Silver to Bronze as a result of Mr. Deshpande’s departure. Before First Eagle, he was an analyst for Oakmark International and Oakmark International Small Cap and an acquaintance of Ed Studzinski’s. During his callow youth, he was also an analyst for Morningstar.

Here’s the goal: “we hope to address a significant need for investment strategies that effectively seek to manage risk and utilize active reserve management in an effort to preserve value for investors,” says Mr. Deshpande. “It’s our intention to manage Centerstone’s multi-asset strategies in such a way that they can serve as core holdings for patient investors concerned with managing risk.”

Given that he’s running this fund as a near-clone of SGENX, is there any reason to invest here rather than there? I could imagine three:

1. Deshpande was seen as the driver of SGENX’s success in the years after Mr. Eveillard’s departure, which is reflected in the Morningstar downgrade when he left. So there’s talent on Centerstone’s side.
2. SGENX has $47 billion in assets and is still open, which limits the fund’s investable universe and largely precludes many of the small issues that drove its early success. Centerstone, with $15 million in assets, should be far more maneuverable for far longer.
3. First Eagle is in the process of being taken over by two private equity firms after generations as a family-owned business. Centerstone is entirely owned by its founder and employees, so its culture is less at-risk.

The opening expense ratio for “A” shares is 1.36% after waivers and the minimum initial investment is $5000. The “A” shares have a 5% front load but Mr. Deshpande expects that load-waived shares will be widely available. The investment minimum for institutional shares is $100,000 but the e.r. does drop to 1.11%. In lieu of a conventional factsheet, Centerstone provides a thoughtful overview that works through the fund’s strategy and risk-return profile. Centerstone’s homepage is regrettably twitchy but there’s a thoughtful letter from Mr. Deshpande that’s well worth tracking down.

Launch Alert: Matthews Asia Credit Opportunities (MCRDX)

Matthews Asia Credit Opportunities (MCRDX/MICPX) launched on April 29, 2016.

Matthews International Capital Management, LLC, the Investment Advisor to the Matthews Asia Funds, was founded in 1991 by Paul Matthews. Since then they’ve been the only U.S. fund complex devoted to Asia. They have about $21 billion in fund assets and advise18 funds. Of those, two focus on Asian credit markets: Strategic Income (MAINX) and Credit Opportunities.

Both of the credit-oriented funds are managed by Teresa Kong and Satya Patel. Ms. Kong joined Matthews in 2010 after serving as Head of E.M. Investments for BlackRock, then called Barclays Global. She founded their Emerging Markets Fixed Income Group and managed a bunch of portfolios. Her degrees are both from Stanford, she’s fluent in Cantonese and okay at Mandarin. Mr. Patel joined Matthews in 2011 from Concerto Asset Management where he was an investment analyst. He’s also earned degrees from Georgia (B.A.), the London School of Economics (M.A. in accounting and finance) and the University of Chicago (M.B.A. ). The state of his Mandarin is undisclosed.

The fund invests primarily in dollar-denominated Asian credit securities. The fund’s managers want their returns driven by security selection rather than the vagaries of the international currency market. And so “credit” excludes all local currency bonds. At least 80% of the portfolio will be invested in traditional sorts of credit securities – mostly “sub-investment grade securities” – while up to 20% might be placed in convertibles or hybrid securities.

Four things stand out about the fund:

The manager is really good. In our conversations, Ms. Kong has been consistently sharp, clear and thoughtful. Her Strategic Income fund has returned 4.2% annually since inception, in line with its EM Hard Currency Debt peer group, but it has done it with substantially less volatility.

The fund’s targets are reasonable and clearly expressed. “The objective of the strategy,” Ms. Kong reports, “is to deliver 6-9% return with 6-9% volatility over the long term.”

Their opportunity set is substantial and attractive. The Asia credit market is over $600 billion and the sub-investment grade slice which they’ll target is $130 billion. For a variety of reasons, “about a quarter of Asian bonds are not rated by one of the Big Three US rating agencies anymore,” which limits competition for the bonds since many U.S. investors can only invest in rated bonds. That also increases the prospect for mispricing, which adds the Matthews’ advantage. “Over the past 15 years,” they report, “Asia high yield has a cumulative return double that of European, LATAM and US high yield, with less risk than Europe and LATAM.” Here’s the picture of it all:

You might draw a line between Asia Credit and Asia HY then assume that the fund will fall on that line rather nearer to Asia HY.

The fund’s returns are independent of the Fed. U.S. investors are rightly concerned about the effect of the Fed’s next couple tightening moves. The correlation between the Asia HY market and the Barclays US Aggregate is only 0.39. Beyond that, the managers have the ability to use U.S. interest rate futures to hedge U.S. interest rate risk.

The opening expense ratio for Investor shares is 1.1% and the minimum initial investment is $2500, reduced to $500 for IRAs. The investment minimum for institutional shares is $3 million but the e.r. does drop to 0.90%. Matthews has provide a thoughtful introduction that works through the fund’s strategy and risk-return profile. The fund’s homepage is understandably thin on content but Matthews, institutionally, is a pretty content-rich site.

Manager Changes

It’s been a singularly quiet month so far, with changes in the management teams at just 32 funds (tabulated below). In truth, none of the additions or subtractions appears to be game-changers.

Because bond fund managers, traditionally, had made relatively modest impacts of their funds’ absolute returns, Manager Changes typically highlights changes in equity and hybrid funds.

Ticker	Fund	Out with the old	In with the new	Date
ARDWX	Aberdeen Multi-Manager Alternative Strategies Fund II	Santa Fe Partners LLC no longer serves as a sub-adviser to the fund, and Henry Davis is no longer listed as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Ian McDonald, Averell Mortimer, Darren Wolf, Russell Barlow, Vicky Hudson, Peter Wasko and Kevin Lyons remain on the management team	5/16
ASTYX	AllianzGI Best Styles International Equity	No one, but …	Erik Mulder joined Michael Heldmann and Karsten Niemann in managing the fund.	5/16
AZDAX	AllianzGI Global Fundamental Strategy Fund	Andreas Utermann is no longer listed as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Neil Dwane joins the management team of Armin Kayser, Karl Happe, Eric Boess, and Steven Berexa.	5/16
BGEIX	American Century Global Gold Fund	William Martin and Lynette Pang are no longer listed as portfolio managers for the fund.	Yulin Long and Elizabeth Xie are now managing the fund.	5/16
BDMAX	BlackRock Global Long/Short Equity Fund	Paul Ebner is no longer listed as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Richard Mathieson joins Raffaele Savi and Kevin Franklin in managing the fund.	5/16
BMSAX	BlackRock Secured Credit Portfolio	Carly Wilson and C. Adrian Marshall are gone.	Mitchell Garfin remains and is joined by James Keenan, Jeff Cucunato, Jose Aguilar and Artur Piasecki.	5/16
BIALX	Brown Advisory Global Leaders Fund	No one, but …	Bertie Thomson joins Michael Dillon in managing the fund.	5/16
CSIBX	Calvert Bond Portfolio	Matthew Duch will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Vishal Khanduja and Brian  Ellis will remain on the portfolio management team.	5/16
CGAFX	Calvert Green Bond Fund	Matthew Duch will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Vishal Khanduja and Brian  Ellis will remain on the portfolio management team.	5/16
CYBAX	Calvert High Yield Bond Fund	Matthew Duch will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Vishal Khanduja and Brian  Ellis will remain on the portfolio management team and will be joined by Patrick Faul.	5/16
CFICX	Calvert Income Fund	Matthew Duch will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Vishal Khanduja and Brian  Ellis will remain on the portfolio management team.	5/16
CLDAX	Calvert Long-Term Income Fund	Matthew Duch will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Vishal Khanduja and Brian  Ellis will remain on the portfolio management team.	5/16
CSDAX	Calvert Short Duration Income Fund	Matthew Duch will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Vishal Khanduja and Brian  Ellis will remain on the portfolio management team.	5/16
CULAX	Calvert Ultra-Short Income Fund	Matthew Duch will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Vishal Khanduja and Brian  Ellis will remain on the portfolio management team.	5/16
SDUAX	Deutsche Ultra Short Duration Bond Fund, soon to be the Deutsche Fixed Income Opportunities Fund	As of August 31, Eric Meyer will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for the fund.	John Ryan is joined by Roger Douglas and Rahmila Nadi in managing the fund.	5/16
DGANX	Dreyfus Global Infrastructure Fund	Joshua Kohn is no longer listed as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Maneesh Chhabria is joined by Theodore Brooks on the management team.	5/16
ETMGX	Eaton Vance Tax-Managed Small-Cap Fund	Nancy Took, lead portfolio manager, announced her intention to retire at the end of October, 2016.	Michael McLean and J. Griffith Noble will continue with the fund.	5/16
GSBFX	Goldman Sachs Income Builder Fund	Effective immediately, Lale Topcuoglu no longer serves as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Daniel Lochner, Charles Dane, Colin Bell, Ronald Arons, Andrew Braun and David Beers will continue to manage the fund.	5/16
HBIAX	HSBC Global High Income Bond Fund	Lisa Chua is no longer listed as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Nishant Upadhyay joins Rick Liu and Jerry Samet in managing the fund.	5/16
HBYAX	HSBC Global High Yield Bond Fund	Lisa Chua is no longer listed as a portfolio manager for the fund.	Nishant Upadhyay joins Rick Liu and Mary Gottshall Bowers in managing the fund.	5/16
WASAX	Ivy Asset Strategy Fund	Mike Avery will no longer manage the fund, effective June 30, 2016.	F. Chace Brundige and Cynthia Prince-Fox will continue to co-manager the fund.	5/16
IVTAX	Ivy Managed International Opportunities Fund	Mike Avery will no longer manage the fund, effective June 30, 2016.	At that time, F. Chace Brundige and Cynthia Prince-Fox will become co-managers of the fund.	5/16
JMMAX	JPMorgan Multi-Manager Alternatives Fund	No one, but …	P/E Global LLC has been added as an eleventh subadvisor to the fund.	5/16
SCGLX	Scout Global Equity Fund	James Moffett and founding manager James Reed are no longer listed as portfolio managers for the fund.	Charles John is joined by John Indellicate and Derek Smashey. Somehow the combination of “indelicate” and “smashy” seems like fodder for a bunch of in-jokes.	5/16
UMBWX	Scout International Fund	Michael P. Fogarty no longer serves as a portfolio manager of the fund.	Michael Stack and Angel Luperico will continue to manage the fund.	5/16
SEQUX	Sequoia Fund	No one, but …	John Harris, Arman Gokgol-Kline, Trevor Magyar, and David Sheridan join David Poppe as co-managers.	5/16
TVOAX	Touchstone Small Cap Value Fund	DePrince Race & Zollo, Inc. will no longer subadvise the fund. Gregory Ramsby and Randy Renfrow will no longer serve as portfolio managers for the fund.	Russell Implementation Services will subadvise the fund, with Wayne Holister as portfolio manager, until June 30, 2016. After June 30, LMCG Investments will become the subadvisor to the fund.	5/16
USIFX	USAA International Fund	No one, but …	Filipe Benzinho is joining Susanne Willumsen, James Shakin, Craig Scholl, Paul Moghtader, Ciprian Marin, Taras Ivanenko, Andrew Corry, Daniel Ling and Marcus Smith to manage the fund.	5/16
HEMZX	Virtus Emerging Markets Opportunities Fund	No one, but …	Brian Bandsma and Jin Zhang join Matthew Benkendorf in managing the fund	5/16
JVIAX	Virtus Foreign Opportunities Fund	No one, but …	Daniel Kranson and David Souccar will join Matthew Benkendorf in managing the fund	5/16
NWWOX	Virtus Global Opportunities Fund	No one, but …	Ramiz Chelat will join Matthew Benkendorf in managing the fund	5/16
UNASX	Waddell & Reed Advisors Asset Strategy Fund	Mike Avery will no longer manage the fund, effective June 30, 2016.	F. Chace Brundige and Cynthia Prince-Fox will continue to co-manager the fund.	5/16

A Road Trip to Seafarer

Ben Peters, a CFP and chief compliance officer for Burton Enright Welch in the Bay Area, reported on his field trip to Seafarer in his Q1 shareholder letter. Ben had first learned of Seafarer through the Observer and was kind enough to share these reflections on his trip to Larkspur.

The more we communicated with Seafarer the more confidence we gained. Seafarer’s managers are undeniably, overwhelmingly smart. They have a deep understanding of EM investing and are serious and forthright about the risks. And as with most upper echelon managers, they leave you so impressed as to be uneasy: your impulse is to hand over your last dime.

Our visit to Seafarer’s Larkspur headquarters hammered home our conviction. Many fund managers want to be seen as the masters of the universe. Their offices usually have the downtown location, sweeping views, and fancy artwork to match.

Seafarer’s HQ is refreshing. Seafarer resides in a 3-story, non-descript office park in a quaint Bay-side town. There was no receptionist, flat screen TVs, or abstract paintings … the grand tour didn’t require any walking because the whole office is visible from the middle of the room …

The humble setting is symbolic. Seafarer is one of the lowest fee active emerging markets managers available even though it is relatively small.

Updates

Execution postponed: back in February 2016, the Board of $95 million ASTON Small Cap Fund (ATASX) moved to appoint GW&K Investment Management, LLC as subadviser to the fund in anticipation merging it into the year-old, $1.5 million AMG GW&K Small Cap Growth Fund (GWGIX). In May the board reversed course on the merger, though it still hopes to have GW&K run the fund permanently.

With the same enthusiasm that Republican leaders bring to their belated embrace of Donald Trump, mutual fund advisers are buying active/smart/tilted ETFs to stanch the bleeding. Garth Freisen, a principal at III Capital Management, reports:

[Contining movement of assets from funds to ETFs] helps explain recent moves by traditional asset management companies to acquire ETF-focused firms specializing in the construction of low-cost, active indexing portfolios:

• Hartford Funds bought Lattice Strategies
• Columbia Threadneedle purchased Emerging Global Advisors
• JP Morgan Asset Management made a minority investment in Global X Funds
• New York Life Investment Management acquired IndexIQ
• Oppenheimer Funds purchased RevenueShares
• Janus Capital Group bought VS Holdings (Velocity Shares)
• Legg Mason bought QS Investors

In addition, he notes that Goldman Sachs and Fido are launching their own quant-driven ETFs (“Active Management Is Worth It When The Price Is Right,” 5/23/2016).

Briefly Noted . . .

Boston Partners Emerging Markets Long/Short Fund (BDMAX) has announced that “the Adviser expects that the Fund’s long positions will not exceed approximately 50% of the Fund’s net assets with an average of 30% to 70% net long.” Heretofore the extent of the fund’s market exposure wasn’t constrained in the prospectus.

Stonebridge Capital Management has announced they no longer intend to advise the Stonebridge Small-Cap Growth Fund (SBSGX). “The Board is considering alternative plans with respect to the Fund, which may include closure and liquidation of the Fund.” Here’s what the Board has to wrestle with: an utterly dismal track record that will haunt any future manager, $12 million in assets and expenses north of 2.1% per year. One of the two managers has been with the fund for 16 years and still has not invested a penny in it. The only bright side is that the fund has a substantial embedded tax loss (Morningstar estimates about 17%) so liquidation would partially offset taxable gains elsewhere in an investor’s portfolio.

From the file labeled “I learn something new every month.” Touchstone Small Cap Value Fund (TVOAX) is switching managers. On May 20, 2016, DePrince, Race & Zollo, Inc. are out. On June 30, 2016, LMCG steps in. And what happens during the six week interregnum? Russell happens. Russell Implementation Services provides caretaker management in the window between the departure of one manager or team and the arrival of the next. Touchstone’s SEC filing reports:

Russell will make investment decisions for the Fund and also ensure compliance with the Fund’s investment policies and guidelines. Russell has been providing transition management services to clients since 1992. Russell has transitioned nearly $2.3 trillion in assets for clients in over 2,300 transition events in the last three calendar years. As of December 2015, Russell was managing 17 mandates with $1.7 billion in assets across a broad range of asset classes.

That implies $800 billion/year in assets temporarily managed by a caretaker. Who knew?

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

All eight share classes of AB Small Cap Growth (QUASX) re-opened to new investors on June 1, 2016.

Effective June 3, 2016, Dreyfus International Stock Fund (DISAX) will be re-opened to new investors.

Touchstone Sands Capital Select Growth Fund (TSNAX) closed to new accounts, with certain exceptions, on April 8, 2013. With due consideration, the Advisor has determined to re-open the Fund for sales to investors making purchases in an account or relationship related to a fee-based, advisory platform.

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Value Fund (UBVAX) appears to be closing a bit more tightly. The fund is currently closed to new investors which eight classes of exceptions. As of June 27, 2016, the number of exceptions decreases to six and the wording on some of those six seems a bit more restrictive. It appears from the filing that the two lost exceptions will be:

• Approved brokerage platforms where the Fund is on a recommended list compiled by a Financial Intermediary’s research department as of the Closing Date may continue to utilize the Fund for new and existing accounts.
• Approved Section 529 college savings plans utilizing the Fund as of the Closing Date may do so for new and existing accounts.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

On July 1, 2016, BlackRock Managed Volatility Portfolio (PBAIX) will be renamed BlackRock Tactical Opportunities Fund. The revised statement of investment strategy doesn’t mention volatility but, instead, talks about “an appropriate return-to-risk trade-off” and warns of the prospect of frequent trading.

Also on July 1, BlackRock Secured Credit Portfolio (BMSAX) gets renamed BlackRock Credit Strategies Income Fund. Up until now it has invested, quite successfully, in “secured instruments, including bank loans and bonds, issued primarily, but not exclusively, by below investment grade issuers.” Going forward it will have one of those “invest in any danged thing we want to” strategies. Pursuant thereunto, two of the three current managers get sacked and four new managers get added. After the dust settles, four of the fund’s five managers will bear the rank “Managing Director.” The fifth, poor Artur Piasecki, is merely “Director.”

That same exhausting day, BlackRock Managed Volatility Portfolio (PCBAX) becomes BlackRock Tactical Opportunities Fund. The new investment strategy highlights frequent trading and the use of derivatives. It also abandons the old 50% global stocks / 50% global bonds benchmark.

As of August 1, 2016, Deutsche Ultra-Short Duration Fund (SDUAX) will be renamed Deutsche Fixed Income Opportunities Fund. Following the fund’s name change, its amorphous investment goal (“current income consistent with total return”) remains but its strategy changes from allowing up to 50% non-investment grade plus up to 20% cash to 30% non-investment grade with no reference to cash. Its principal benchmark becomes a 3-month LIBOR index.

Effective June 14, 2016, “Fidelity” will replace “Spartan” in the fund name for each Spartan Index Fund a/k/a each Fidelity Index fund.

On July 5, 2016, Victory CEMP Multi-Asset Growth Fund (LTGCX) will be renamed the Victory CEMP Global High Dividend Defensive Fund and its investment objective will change to reflect a dividend income component. This will be the fund’s second name in a year; up until November it was Compass EMP Multi-Asset Growth Fund. It’s a fund of Victory CEMP’s volatility-weighted ETFs. At 2.12% in expenses for 1.46% in long-term annual returns, one might suspect that it’s overpriced.

The sub-adviser to SilverPepper Merger Arbitrage Fund (SPABX/SPAIX) has changed its name from Brown Trout Management, LLC to Chicago Capital Management, LLC.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

AAM/HIMCO Unconstrained Bond Fund (AHUAX) will undergo “termination, liquidation and dissolution” on June 28, 2016.

Eaton Vance Richard Bernstein Market Opportunities Fund (ERMAX) has closed and will liquidate on June 29, 2016. This is another “well, we gave it almost two years (!) before pulling the plug” fund.

Eaton Vance Currency Income Advantage Fund (ECIAX) will return its $1 million in assets to investors and vanish, after almost three years of operation, on June 29, 2016.

Goldman Sachs Financial Square Tax-Exempt California Fund (ITCXX) and Goldman Sachs Financial Square Tax-Exempt New York Fund (IYAXX) were slated for liquidation on August 31, 2016 but the Board and advisor got twitchy. Each fund now faces execution on June 10, 2016.

Harbor Funds’ Board of Trustees has determined to liquidate and dissolve the Harbor Unconstrained Bond Fund (HRUBX), which is roughly but not perfectly a clone of PIMCO Unconstrained Bond (PUBDX). The liquidation of the Fund is expected to occur on July 29, 2016.

Little Harbor Multi-Strategy Composite Fund (LHMSX), which you didn’t know existed, now no longer exists.

The Board of Trustees of Northern Funds has decreed that Multi-Manager Large Cap Fund (NMMLX), Multi-Manager Small Cap Fund (NMMSX), and Multi-Manager Mid Cap Fund (NMMCX) be liquidated on July 22, 2016. About that “multi-manager” thing: each of the funds is run by same two Northern Trust managers. They haven’t been noticeably “multi” since about 2012. They have about $900 million in assets between them with the smallest, Small Cap, posted the best relative returns.

Oppenheimer Commodity Strategy Total Return Fund (QRAAX) will liquidate on July 15, 2016. Why, you ask? Uhhhh …

The Board of Trustees of The Purisima Funds has determined that it is advisable “to liquidate, dissolve and terminate the legal existence” of The Purisima Total Return Fund (PURIX) and The Purisima All-Purpose Fund (PURLX). Their departure is notable primarily because of their manager, Kenneth Fisher, America’s largest investment advisor and source of, oh, I don’t know, one-third of all of the pop-up ads on the internet.

As of May 9, PURLX had $46,374 and PURIX has $257 million. Whether you judge PURIX as “unimpressive” or “almost freakishly bad” depends on whether you ask Lipper or Morningstar. Lipper benchmarks it against the Flexible Portfolio group, which it trails only modestly since inception. Morningstar categorizes it as domestic large-blend, and it trails the vast majority of such funds over every period from one-year to fifteen. In reality, Lipper is probably a truer fit. The fund is about 65% US large caps, 20% international large caps and 10% “other,” which includes two exchange-traded notes in its top 10 holdings. Regardless of the rater, the funds’ record suggests that Mr. Fisher – son of Phil Fisher (author of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, 1958, and “one of the great investors of all time,” according to Morningstar) – seems better suited to marketing than managing.

The month’s oddest closure announcement: “On May 6, 2016, at the recommendation of SF Advisors, LLC, the investment adviser to the Trust, the Trust’s Board of Trustees approved the closing and subsequent liquidation of the Funds. Accordingly, the Funds are expected to cease operations, liquidate any assets, and distribute the liquidation proceeds to shareholders of record on June 6, 2016.” Uhhh … no such funds were ever launched. This raises the same philosophical question as the speculation that near black holes, particles could be destroyed the moment before they’re created. Can funds that have never commenced operations cease them?

Pending shareholder approval (which is a lot like saying “pending the rising of the sun”), Stratus Government Securities (STGSX) and Stratus Growth (STWAX) will liquidate on June 10, 2016. How much suspense is there about the outcome of the vote? Well, the vote is Tuesday, June 7and liquidation is scheduled (tentatively, of course) for Friday of that same week.

Thomson Horstmann & Bryant Small Cap Value Fund (THBSX) will liquidate on June 24, 2016.

Effective May 6, 2016, Virtus Alternative Income Solution Fund, Virtus Alternative Inflation Solution Fund and Virtus Alternative Total Solution Fund were liquidated. Lest that phrase confuse us, the adviser clarifies: “The funds have ceased to exist.”

In Closing . . .

If you own an Android smart phone, you should go download and use the Ampere app. As you’re reading this, Chip and I will be in Scotland, likely in the vicinity of Inverness. One of the great annoyances of modern travel is the phenomenal rate at which phones drain their batteries and the subsequent need to search for charging options in airports and rail stations. What I didn’t know is how much of a different your charging cable makes in how much time it will take to regain a reasonable charge. Ampere is an app which measures, among other useful things, how quickly your phone is recharging.

It turns out that the quality of charging cable makes a huge difference. Below are two screencaps. I started with same charger and the phone then worked my way through a set of four different charging cables. The charge rates varied greatly from cable to cable.

In the instance above, it would take nearly four times as long to recharge my phone using the cable on the left. Every cable I tested produced a different charge rate, from a low of 300 mA to a high of 1200 mA.

My suggestion for travelers: download Ampere, use it to identify your best-performing cables then ditch the rest, and remember to switch to “airplane mode” for faster charging.

You’re welcome.

As ever, we want to take a moment to offer a sincere xei xei to all the folks who’ve supported us this month in thought, word and deed. To our faithful friends, Deb (still hoping to make it to Albuquerque) and Greg, thank you. Thanks, too, to Andrew, William, Robert, and Jason (all the way from Surrey, UK). We appreciate your generosity. 

We’ll look for you at Morningstar! We’re hopeful of catching up with a number of folks at the conference including folks from Centerstone, Evermore, FPA, Intrepid, Matthews and Seafarer … with maybe just a hint of Poplar Forest, a glimpse of Polaris and the teasing possibility of ride down Queens Road. We’ll post synopses to our discussion board each day and we’ll offer some more-refined prose when you come by for our July issue.

Remember, as you’re reading this, Chip and I are chillin’ in Scotland. If you’ve got questions or concerns about this month’s issue and you’d like them addressed before my return on June 7^th, please drop a note to our colleague and data wizard, Charles Boccadoro. He’s got the keys to the back door.

As ever,

By David Snowball

These 263 funds had not, as of 4/30/2016, yet regained the NAV they had at the start of the current market cycle in October, 2007. They’re arranged alphabetically but don’t include share class designations. Funds on a roller coaster – those that crashed in the financial crisis then crashed again afterward are highlighted in orange. Diversified domestic funds are highlighted in blue.

APR is a fund’s annualized percent return from 11/07 under 04/16. Max DD is the fund’s maximum drawdown or greatest percentage decline, during that period. MAX date is the month in which the fund bottomed. Bear rating is the fund’s performance during all bear market months from 11/07 to now, not just during extended market declines. The worst bear market performers are in the 10^th decile.

All data is derived from the Lipper database, as of 4/30/16.

	Symbol	Categor	APR	MAX DD	MAX Date	Bear
AB Int’l Growth	AWPAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-1.8	-58.5	200902	7
AB Int’l Value	ABIYX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-3.4	-62.7	200902	5
Aberdeen China Opportunities I	GOPIX	China Region	-3.4	-59.6	200902	4
Aberdeen Select Int’l Equity	BJBIX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-1.5	-58.3	200902	7
Aberdeen Select Int’l Equity II	JETIX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-2.3	-76.4	200902	9
Acadian Emerging Markets Portfolio	AEMGX	Emerging Markets	-3.5	-61.4	200902	8
Alger Global Growth	CHUSX	Global Multi-Cap Growth	-5	-65.2	200902	6
AllianzGI Emerging Markets Opportunities	AOTIX	Emerging Markets	-1.1	-60.2	200902	8
Alpine Dynamic Dividend	ADVDX	Global Equity Income	-6.3	-63.9	200902	9
Alpine Int’l Real Estate Equity	EGLRX	Int’l Real Estate	-1.5	-61.3	200902	9
American Century Emerging Markets	TWMIX	Emerging Markets	-2.5	-68.7	200902	10
American Century Int’l Core Equity	ACIUX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-1.5	-57.4	200902	6
American Century Int’l Discovery	TWEGX	Int’l Small/Mid-Cap Growth	-1.7	-57.6	200902	7
American Century Int’l Value	MEQAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-4.6	-62.7	200902	8
American Century NT Emerging Markets	ACLKX	Emerging Markets	-1.5	-62.9	200902	8
American Independence Navellier Int’l	IMSSX	Int’l Large-Cap Growth	-4.4	-68.1	200902	8
AMG Managers Brandywine Advisors Mid Cap Growth	BWAFX	Mid-Cap Growth	-1.1	-59.2	200902	6
API Efficient Frontier Core Income	APIMX	Short Investment Grade Debt	-3.8	-59.6	200902	8
Artisan Emerging Markets	APHEX	Emerging Markets	-2.5	-61.2	200902	9
Banks UltraSector ProFund	BKPIX	Equity Leverage	-3.7	-63.9	200902	9
BlackRock Emerging Markets	MADCX	Emerging Markets	-2.5	-58.8	200902	6
BlackRock Int’l Index	MAIIX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-1.8	-58.9	200902	4
BLDRS Asia 50 ADR Index	ADRA	Pacific Region	-3	-60.4	200902	7
BLDRS Developed Markets 100 ADR Index	ADRD	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-1.8	-58	200902	6
BLDRS Emerging Markets 50 ADR Index	ADRE	Emerging Markets	-3.3	-75	200902	10
BLDRS Europe Select ADR Index	ADRU	European Region	-2.4	-58.2	200902	3
BNY Mellon Int’l Appreciation	MPPMX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-2.7	-58.6	200902	8
Calvert Int’l Equity	CWVGX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-3.6	-60.6	200902	8
ClearBridge Int’l Growth	LMGTX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-4.3	-62.2	200902	10
Cohen & Steers Int’l Realty	IRFIX	Int’l Real Estate	-3.9	-62.8	200902	5
Columbia Emerging Markets	UMEMX	Emerging Markets	-2.9	-55	200902	2
Columbia Int’l Opportunities	NMOAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-4.7	-62.5	200902	8
Columbia Int’l Value	EMIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-4.2	-62.1	200902	5
Columbia Select Int’l Equity	NIEQX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-3.7	-82.3	201006	4
Commonwealth Japan	CNJFX	Japanese	-2	-52.2	200902	3
Consulting Group Capital Markets Emerging Markets Equity	TEMUX	Emerging Markets	-4.4	-67.5	200902	8
Consulting Group Capital Markets Int’l Equity	TIEUX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-2.4	-57.7	200902	8
Cullen Int’l High Dividend	CIHIX	Int’l Equity Income	-1.7	-58.2	200902	7
Davis Int’l	DILAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-1.5	-57.2	200902	7
Deutsche CROCI Int’l	SCINX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-4.2	-64.7	200902	7
Deutsche EAFE Equity Index	BTAEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-3	-60.5	200902	4
Deutsche Emerging Markets Equity	SEMGX	Emerging Markets	-1.9	-58	200902	8
Deutsche Global Equity	MGINX	Global Multi-Cap Growth	-0.7	-72	200902	8
Deutsche World Dividend	SCGEX	Global Equity Income	-0.4	-70.2	200902	9
DFA Tax-Managed Int’l Value Portfolio	DTMIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-2.8	-61.4	200902	9
Direxion Monthly 7-10 Year Treasury Bear 2x	DXKSX	Specialty Fixed Income	-3	-63.6	200902	6
Direxion Monthly Emerging Markets Bull 2x	DXELX	Equity Leverage	-5.8	-63.1	200902	6
Direxion Monthly S&P 500 Bull 2x	DXSLX	Equity Leverage	-1.5	-53.9	200902	2
Direxion Monthly Small Cap Bull 2x	DXRLX	Equity Leverage	-2	-68	200902	6
Dreyfus Int’l Equity	DIERX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-4.7	-63.8	200902	5
Dreyfus Int’l Stock Index	DIISX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-3.7	-67.8	200902	7
Dreyfus/Newton Int’l Equity	SNIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-3.6	-68.7	200902	8
Dunham Emerging Markets Stock	DNEMX	Emerging Markets	-2.2	-58.1	200902	4
Eaton Vance Greater China Growth	EVCGX	China Region	-4.8	-58.8	201205	8
Elfun Int’l Equity	EGLBX	Int’l Large-Cap Growth	-4.4	-60.3	200902	5
Europe 30 ProFund	UEPIX	European Region	-3.3	-63.9	200902	3
Federated InterContinental	RIMAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-2.7	-59.9	200902	8
Fidelity Advisor Emerging Markets	FIMKX	Emerging Markets	0	-67	200902	8
Fidelity Advisor Financial Services	FFSIX	Financial Services	-4.1	-66	200902	5
Fidelity Advisor Int’l Small Cap Opportunities	FOPIX	Int’l Small/Mid-Cap Growth	-3.6	-73.5	200902	10
Fidelity Emerging Asia	FSEAX	Emerging Markets	-8.5	-66.1	201205	9
Fidelity Emerging Markets	FEMKX	Emerging Markets	-5.5	-63.1	200902	4
Fidelity Int’l Real Estate	FIREX	Int’l Real Estate	-2.4	-64.5	200902	7
Fidelity Int’l Value	FIVLX	Int’l Large-Cap Value	-1.3	-57.6	200902	6
Fidelity Japan	FJPNX	Japanese	-1	-65.2	200902	4
Fidelity Overseas	FOSFX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-14.6	-96	200902	10
Fidelity Select Consumer Finance	FSVLX	Financial Services	-2.4	-57.3	200902	4
Fidelity Select Financial Services	FIDSX	Financial Services	-2.4	-56.4	200902	5
Financial Select Sector SPDR	XLF	Financial Services	-0.8	-63.4	200902	2
Financials UltraSector ProFund	FNPIX	Equity Leverage	-1.7	-57	200902	6
First Trust STOXX European Select Dividend Index	FDD	Int’l Equity Income	-1.9	-60.7	200902	8
GE  Int’l Equity	GIEIX	Int’l Large-Cap Growth	-2	-63.9	200902	9
Glenmede Int’l Portfolio	GTCIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-3.6	-60.2	200902	6
GMO Emerging Countries III	GMCEX	Emerging Markets	-3.1	-58.4	200902	8
GMO Emerging Markets III	GMOEX	Emerging Markets	-0.9	-67.5	200902	4
GMO Foreign III	GMOFX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-3.1	-64.4	200902	5
Goldman Sachs Asia Equity	GSAGX	Pacific Ex Japan	-3.6	-63.8	200902	5
Goldman Sachs Emerging Markets Equity	GEMIX	Emerging Markets	-2	-53.2	200902	9
Goldman Sachs Emerging Markets Equity Insights	GERIX	Emerging Markets	-4.1	-67.5	200902	8
Goldman Sachs Focused Int’l Equity	GSIFX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-2.9	-55.4	200902	5
Goldman Sachs Int’l Equity Insights	GCIIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-4	-66.8	200902	8
Goldman Sachs Int’l Real Estate	GIRIX	Int’l Real Estate	-2.5	-59.4	200902	7
Goldman Sachs Strategic Int’l Equity	GSIKX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-2.5	-59.7	200902	10
Great-West MFS Int’l Value	MXIVX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-2.5	-57.4	200902	7
Guggenheim BRIC ETF	EEB	Emerging Markets	-1.5	-57.5	200902	6
Guggenheim Investments CurrencyShares British Pound Sterling Trust	FXB	Alternative Currency Strategies	-4.3	-61.7	200902	4
Guggenheim S&P Global Dividend Opportunities Index ETF	LVL	Global Equity Income	-6.2	-58.8	200902	10
GuideMark World ex-US	GMWEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-1.6	-57.4	200902	6
GuideStone Funds: Int’l Equity	GIEYX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-1.9	-55.8	200902	4
Guinness Atkinson Funds: Alternative Energy	GAAEX	Global Natural Resources	-3.8	-60.2	200902	7
Guinness Atkinson Funds: Asia Focus	IASMX	Pacific Ex Japan	-1	-58	200902	7
Guinness Atkinson Funds: China & Hong Kong	ICHKX	China Region	-1.5	-58.2	200902	4
Harbor Int’l Growth	HAIGX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-4.7	-62.5	200902	8
Hartford Int’l Growth	HNCYX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-4.4	-63.8	200902	5
Hatteras Alpha Hedged Strategies	ALPHX	Absolute Return	-3.4	-60.6	200902	9
Horizon Spin-off and Corporate Restructuring	LSHAX	Global Small-/Mid-Cap	-1.2	-40.8	200902	1
ICON Emerging Markets	ICARX	Emerging Markets	-1.6	-57.3	200902	8
ICON Financial	ICFSX	Financial Services	-2.6	-67.7	200902	5
ICON Int’l Equity	ICNEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-4.2	-79.5	200902	10
INTECH Int’l Managed Volatility	JMIIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-2.8	-57.9	200902	4
Invesco Greater China	IACFX	China Region	-3.7	-68.2	200902	8
Invesco Intl Core Equity	IIBCX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-2.7	-62.8	200902	10
Invesco Pacific Growth	TGRBX	Pacific Region	-1.8	-59.7	200902	6
iPath Exchange Traded Notes Bloomberg Livestock Subindex Total Return ETN	COW	Commodities Agriculture	-2.6	-61.9	200902	9
iPath Exchange Traded Notes Bloomberg Nickel Subindex Total Return ETN	JJN	Commodities Base Metals	-2.1	-57.6	200902	5
iPath Exchange Traded Notes iPath GBP/USD Exchange Rate ETN Medium-Term Notes	GBB	Alternative Currency Strategies	-5.2	-66.7	200902	10
iShares China Large-Cap ETF	FXI	China Region	-2.2	-59.3	200902	8
iShares Europe ETF	IEV	European Region	-3.1	-61.9	200902	9
iShares Global Financials ETF	IXG	Global Financial Services	-2.2	-58.8	200902	5
iShares Global Utilities ETF	JXI	Utility	-2.6	-58	200902	6
iShares MSCI Austria Capped ETF	EWO	European Region	-1.7	-54.8	200902	6
iShares MSCI Belgium Capped ETF	EWK	European Region	-1.2	-61.6	200902	8
iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF	EFV	Int’l Large-Cap Value	-5.9	-57	200902	7
iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF	EEM	Emerging Markets	-2.5	-60.5	200902	6
iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF	EZU	European Region	-4.4	-67.3	200902	8
iShares MSCI France ETF	EWQ	European Region	-2	-56.1	200902	3
iShares MSCI Italy Capped ETF	EWI	European Region	-3.9	-72.8	200902	8
iShares MSCI South Korea Capped ETF	EWY	Pacific Ex Japan	-2.3	-57.7	200902	8
iShares MSCI Spain Capped ETF	EWP	European Region	-3.5	-60.6	200902	5
iShares US Broker-Dealers ETF	IAI	Financial Services	-3.1	-58.2	200902	6
iShares US Financial Services ETF	IYG	Financial Services	-10.9	-63.3	201501	6
iShares US Financials ETF	IYF	Financial Services	-2.3	-69.7	200902	7
Ivy Emerging Markets Equity	IPOAX	Emerging Markets	-0.6	-30.4	200903	4
Ivy European Opportunities	IEOAX	European Region	-7.2	-94.4	200903	10
Jacob Small Cap Growth	JSCGX	Small-Cap Growth	-2.6	-66	200902	9
Janus Overseas	JNOSX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-4.7	-64.2	200902	7
John Hancock Greater China Opportunities	JCOIX	China Region	-0.3	-43.3	200902	7
John Hancock Int’l Core	GIDEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-4.6	-63.3	200902	9
JPMorgan Emerging Markets Equity	JMIEX	Emerging Markets	-1.2	-42.8	200903	6
JPMorgan Int’l Research Enhanced Equity	OIEAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-5.2	-60.2	200902	7
JPMorgan Int’l Value	JNUSX	Int’l Large-Cap Value	-0.9	-50.1	200902	1
JPMorgan Intrepid Int’l	JFTAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-3.6	-64.5	200902	8
Lord Abbett Int’l Core Equity	LICYX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-2.7	-58.9	200902	9
LWAS/DFA Int’l High Book to Market	DFHBX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-4	-61.8	200902	9
Madison Hansberger Int’l Growth	HITGX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-3.6	-59	200902	5
MainStay Int’l Equity	MINEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-1.4	-69.6	200902	10
Marketocracy Masters 100	MOFQX	Global Multi-Cap Growth	-1.5	-26.5	200902	3
Marsico Int’l Opportunities	MIOFX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-2.5	-59.3	200902	9
MassMutual Select Diversified Int’l	MMZSX	Int’l Large-Cap Value	-3.7	-51.4	200902	8
MFS Emerging Markets Equity	MEMAX	Emerging Markets	-2.3	-35.7	200902	10
Midas	MIDSX	Precious Metals Equity	-5.1	-58	200902	4
Mobile Telecommunications UltraSector ProFund	WCPIX	Equity Leverage	-8.9	-67.5	200902	9
MSIF Active Int’l Allocation	MSACX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-2.1	-69	200902	10
MSIF Emerging Markets Portfolio	MGEMX	Emerging Markets	-5.1	-67.9	200902	8
MSIF Int’l Real Estate Portfolio	MSUAX	Int’l Real Estate	-6.9	-79.6	200902	10
Nationwide Bailard Int’l Equities	NWHLX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-3.7	-57.3	200902	7
Nationwide Int’l Index	GIXIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-4.6	-53.9	200902	6
New Century Int’l	NCFPX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-5.9	-65.5	200902	6
Northern Emerging Markets Equity Index	NOEMX	Emerging Markets	-2.6	-59.2	200902	7
Northern Int’l Equity Index	NOINX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-9	-66.2	200902	9
Northern Multi-Manager Int’l Equity	NMIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-2.9	-68.4	200902	7
Nysa	NYSAX	Small-Cap Growth	-2.3	-53.8	200902	6
Oppenheimer Int’l Value	QIVAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-8.3	-60.7	200902	7
Optimum Int’l	OIIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-2.8	-60.4	200902	9
PACE Int’l Emerging Markets Equity	PCEMX	Emerging Markets	-1.8	-69	200902	7
PACE Int’l Equity Investments	PCIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-4.7	-69.1	200902	8
Pacific Financial Int’l	PFGIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-2.7	-62.7	200902	8
Parametric Tax-Managed Int’l Equity	ETIGX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-2.1	-62.4	200902	9
Pear Tree PanAgora Emerging Markets	QFFOX	Emerging Markets	-4.8	-74.8	200902	7
Pioneer Emerging Markets	PEMFX	Emerging Markets	-1.7	-67.2	200902	8
Pioneer Int’l Equity	PIIFX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-7.6	-73.1	200902	10
PowerShares DB G10 Currency Harvest	DBV	Alternative Currency Strategies	-4.7	-63.4	200902	4
PowerShares Global Listed Private Equity	PSP	Global Financial Services	-1.6	-56.9	200902	7
PowerShares Golden Dragon China	PGJ	China Region	-3.2	-55	200902	7
PowerShares S&P Int’l Developed Quality	IDHQ	Int’l Small/Mid-Cap Growth	-0.5	-56.2	200902	4
Principal Diversified Int’l	PINPX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-2.2	-57.9	200902	5
Principal Int’l Emerging Markets	PEPSX	Emerging Markets	-5	-66	200902	10
ProShares Ultra Financials	UYG	Equity Leverage	-6.2	-61.6	200902	8
ProShares Ultra Real Estate	URE	Equity Leverage	-1.3	-59.6	200902	9
ProShares Ultra S&P500	SSO	Equity Leverage	-3	-57.2	200902	6
Prudential QMA Int’l Equity	PJIZX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-1.9	-58.3	200902	6
Putnam Global Utilities	PUGIX	Utility	-3.6	-66	200902	7
Putnam Int’l Equity	POVSX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-4.8	-62.2	200902	8
Putnam Int’l Value	PNGAX	Int’l Large-Cap Value	-4.8	-65	200902	10
QS Emerging Markets	LMEMX	Emerging Markets	-6.2	-71.3	200902	8
QS Int’l Equity	LMGEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-1.9	-54.6	200902	2
Schneider Value	SCMLX	Multi-Cap Value	-2.4	-64.5	200902	6
Real Estate UltraSector ProFund	REPIX	Equity Leverage	-2.5	-60.3	200902	9
RidgeWorth Int’l Equity	STITX	Int’l Large-Cap Growth	-7.7	-63.3	200903	5
Rising Rates Opportunity 10 ProFund	RTPIX	Dedicated Short Bias	-6.3	-65.6	200902	7
Rising Rates Opportunity ProFund	RRPIX	Dedicated Short Bias	-1.8	-59.5	200902	5
RS Emerging Markets	GBEMX	Emerging Markets	-2.2	-57.2	200902	6
Russell Int’l Developed Markets	RINYX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-4	-63.1	200902	5
Rydex  Banking	RYKIX	Financial Services	-5.3	-66.8	200902	8
Rydex Financial Services	RYFIX	Financial Services	-1.5	-57.4	200902	6
Rydex Inverse Government Long Bond Strategy	RYJUX	Specialty Fixed Income	-5.2	-68.3	200902	7
Rydex Long Short Equity	RYSRX	Alternative Long/Short Equity	-6.2	-65	200902	7
Rydex Multi-Hedge Strategies	RYMQX	Alternative Multi-Strategy	-4.8	-71.8	200902	8
Rydex Telecommunications	RYMIX	Telecommunication	-1.1	-51.1	200902	10
Rydex: Europe 1.25x Strategy	RYEUX	Equity Leverage	-3.7	-63.2	200902	10
SA Int’l Value	SAHMX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-4	-32.5	201602	3
Salient EM Dividend Signal Inst	PTEMX	Emerging Markets	-3.7	-60.9	200902	6
Salient Int’l Dividend Signal Inv	FFINX	Int’l Equity Income	-4.2	-68.1	200902	8
Salient Int’l Real Estate Inst	KIRYX	Int’l Real Estate	-2	-56.1	200902	5
Sanford C Bernstein Emerging Markets	SNEMX	Emerging Markets	-2.2	-59.2	200902	7
Sanford C Bernstein Int’l	SIMTX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-1.9	-51.6	200902	3
Sanford C Bernstein Tax-Managed Int’l	SNIVX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-4	-65.3	200902	6
Saratoga Advantage Financial Services	SFPAX	Financial Services	-1.9	-55.4	200902	5
Saratoga Advantage Int’l Equity	SIEPX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-1	-89.4	200902	7
Schroder Emerging Market Equity	SEMNX	Emerging Markets	-4.4	-59.9	200902	6
SEI  Emerging Markets Equity	SIEMX	Emerging Markets	-2	-34.1	200901	10
SEI Enhanced Income A	SEEAX	Multi-Sector Income	-2.3	-64.9	200902	2
SEI Int’l Equity	SEITX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-1.2	-62.6	200902	10
SEI World Equity Ex-US A	WEUSX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-7.5	-61.1	200902	4
Shelton European Growth & Income	EUGIX	European Region	-14.1	-72.9	201501	3
Shelton Greater China	SGCFX	China Region	-1	-66	200902	3
Sit Developing Markets Growth	SDMGX	Emerging Markets	-3.6	-66.6	200902	8
Sit Int’l Growth	SNGRX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-3.4	-59.4	200902	9
SPDR EURO STOXX 50 ETF	FEZ	European Region	-2.9	-55.9	200902	6
SPDR S&P Bank ETF	KBE	Financial Services	-3.3	-64	200902	10
SPDR S&P BRIC 40 ETF	BIK	Emerging Markets	-1.9	-59.9	200902	7
SPDR S&P Capital Markets ETF	KCE	Financial Services	-2	-63.3	200902	10
SPDR STOXX Europe 50 ETF	FEU	European Region	-1.5	-85.4	200902	7
SSgA Int’l Stock Selection	SSAIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-3.6	-61	200902	9
STAAR Int’l	SITIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-1.4	-66.1	200902	10
State Farm Int’l Equity	SFFAX	Int’l Large-Cap Growth	-2.6	-61.1	200902	10
State Farm Int’l Index	SIIAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-3.7	-91	200902	10
State Street Disciplined Emerging Markets Equity	SSEMX	Emerging Markets	-4.4	-62.6	200902	6
Steward Int’l Enhanced Index	SNTCX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-5.1	-65	200902	6
Stonebridge Small-Cap Growth	SBSGX	Small-Cap Core	-2.5	-74.4	200902	9
Strategic Advisers Int’l II	FUSIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-3.6	-62.7	200902	10
SunAmerica Int’l Dividend Strategy	SIEAX	Int’l Equity Income	-1.6	-60.2	200902	7
T Rowe Price Emerging Markets Stock	PRMSX	Emerging Markets	-12.7	-86.9	201205	8
T Rowe Price Institutional Emerging Markets Equity	IEMFX	Emerging Markets	-1.2	-66.8	200902	10
Target Int’l Equity Portfolio	TAIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-1.7	-57.7	200902	7
Templeton BRIC	TABRX	Emerging Markets	-2.1	-55.6	200902	5
Templeton Developing Markets	TEDMX	Emerging Markets	-3.4	-58.5	200902	4
Templeton Emerging Markets	TEEMX	Emerging Markets	-1	-68.7	200902	6
Thomas White Int’l	TWWDX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-1.7	-67	200902	9
TIAA-CREF Int’l Equity	TIIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-16.2	-88	201512	10
Timothy Plan Int’l	TPIAX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-20.4	-89.5	200902	9
Touchstone Int’l Value	FSIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-2.3	-58.9	200902	4
Transamerica Global Equity	IMNAX	Global Multi-Cap Core	-2	-60.3	200902	6
Transamerica Partners Int’l Equity	DVIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-4.3	-46.3	200903	10
UltraEmerging Markets ProFund	UUPIX	Equity Leverage	-4.6	-67.1	200902	5
UltraInt’l ProFund	UNPIX	Equity Leverage	-6.2	-68.5	200902	10
UltraJapan ProFund	UJPIX	Equity Leverage	-8.4	-67.4	200902	3
US Global Investors China Region	USCOX	China Region	-4.3	-69.1	200902	9
USAA Emerging Markets	USEMX	Emerging Markets	-2.9	-64.1	200902	10
Van Eck Emerging Markets	GBFAX	Emerging Markets	-17.9	-85.2	201207	10
VanEck Vectors Uranium+Nuclear Energy ETF	NLR	Global Natural Resources	-4.8	-64.6	200902	6
Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index	VEIEX	Emerging Markets	-7.7	-88.8	200902	7
Vanguard FTSE All-World ex US Index ETF	VEU	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-4.7	-65.1	200902	10
Vanguard Total Int’l Stock Index	VGTSX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-8.3	-52.6	201511	1
Vantagepoint Funds: Overseas Equity Index	VPOIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-7.6	-49	201602	1
Victory Trivalent Int’l-Core Equity	MICIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-2.4	-54.5	200902	3
Voya Diversified Int’l	IFFIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-14	-91.8	200902	10
Voya Int’l Real Estate	IIRIX	Int’l Real Estate	-16	-79.9	201603	8
Wells Fargo Diversified Int’l	SILAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-15.2	-75.3	201603	6
Wells Fargo Int’l Equity	WFEBX	Int’l Multi-Cap Core	-3.4	-63	200901	7
Wells Fargo Int’l Value	WFFAX	Int’l Multi-Cap Value	-5.8	-63.3	200902	5
William Blair Emerging Markets Growth	BIEMX	Emerging Markets	-5	-57.9	200902	8
William Blair Funds Int’l Equity	WIIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-8	-72.1	200902	2
William Blair Int’l Equity I	WIEIX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-1.8	-43.5	200902	3
William Blair Int’l Growth	WBIGX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-20.5	-91.8	200902	10
Wilmington Multi-Manager Int’l	MVIEX	Int’l Multi-Cap Growth	-12.8	-87.1	200902	8
WisdomTree Global ex-US Real Estate	DRW	Int’l Real Estate	-14.9	-92	200910	9
WisdomTree Global ex-US Utilities	DBU	Utility	-4.3	-53	200902	6
WisdomTree Global High Dividend	DEW	Global Equity Income	-7.6	-54.6	201602	1
WisdomTree Int’l Dividend ex-Financials	DOO	Int’l Equity Income	-5.1	-51.3	200902	2
WisdomTree Int’l High Dividend	DTH	Int’l Equity Income	-5	-66	200902	6
WisdomTree Int’l LargeCap Dividend	DOL	Int’l Equity Income	-3.6	-30.8	201602	4
Wright Int’l Blue Chip Equities	WIBCX	Int’l Large-Cap Core	-2.6	-62.1	200902	8

By David Snowball

Dear friends,

There are days in spring when I’m not sure whether what I’m hearing is ticking or dripping. My students know that the end of the school year is nigh. If they glance up from their phones, it’s to glance out the window and across Augustana’s campus. It’s always pretty here, even in November, but there are about four to six weeks when it’s absolutely stunning. For three weeks in spring, the central campus is festooned with blossoms as serviceberry, cherry, apple, and lilac erupt. Again in October the maples dominate, painting the campus crimson and gold.

It’s glorious!

Unless you’re trying to get students to learn about Nazi rhetorical strategies and the parallel strategies of demonization used across cultures. If you do that, then you hear the rhythmic tick, tick, tick as they count down the final weeks of the year.

Or is it the slower drip, drip, drip as their brains leak out of their ears and their IQs puddle on the classroom floor?

And still we find joy in the occasional glimpses of the tremendous growth they’ve already experienced and in the prospect that, come fall, they’ll be back, cheerful and recharged.

At least, until those durn maples take over.

The Dry Powder Gang, revisited

“Put your trust in God but keep your powder dry.”

Oliver Cromwell, 1650, to the soldiers of the New Model Army as they prepared to forge an Irish river and head into battle.

Cromwell was a dour, humorless (or “humourless”) religious fanatic charged with squashing every Catholic and every independent thought in the British Isles because, well, that’s what God demanded. Famine, plague, deportations, mass death and deportations followed.

But even Cromwell knew that the key to victory was prudent preparation; faith did not win battles in the absence of the carefully stocked dry gunpowder that powered the army. There were times to charge ahead and there were times to gather powder.

With investing likewise: there are times to be charge ahead and times to withdraw. Most investors struggle with that decision. Why?

1. Most investment products feed our worst impulses. The investment industry has come to be dominated by passive, fully-invested products over the past five years; not coincidentally, that period has seen just one break in the upward rush. In cap-based funds, more money goes to the best performing stocks in the index so markets get driven by the momentum of fewer and fewer stocks. In 2015, for instance, just four stocks accounted for the S&P 500’s entire gain.
2. Most professional investors worry more about accumulating assets than about serving investors. By most measures, the U.S. stock market is substantially overpriced but the cash reserves at mutual funds are at their lowest levels in history. Why? Because, as Jason Zweig writes, “cash is now a sin.” Cash is a drag on short-term returns and investors fixated on 1/3/5 year returns have poured their money into funds that are fully invested all the time, both index products and the cowardly “active” managers who merely shadow them. The technical term for “skilled investors who do not attract assets to the firm” is “unemployed.”
3. Most of us are too optimistic. Most guys think of themselves as “good investors” or “above average” investors, mostly because “good” is such a vague term and almost none of us actually know how or what we’ve done. Quick quiz: what’s your personal rate of return over the last five years? How much of your portfolio was invested cautiously as the market approached its top in October 2007 and how much was invested aggressively at its bottom in March 2009? The honest answers for most of us are “dunno, dunno, dunno.”

It’s not just about investing. 95% of us think we’re above average drivers. One 1965 study of drivers responsible for car accidents that put people in the hospital found the same: the majority of those drivers rated themselves as “really good.” Jason Zweig talked through a lot of the research and its implications in chapter four of his book Your Money and Your Brain (2007). We originally linked to what turned out to be a plagiarized version of Jason’s work, masquerading as an advisor’s newsletter. (Thanks to Jason for letting us know of the goof.)

The result is that we’re tempted to take on too much risk, sublimely confident that it will all work out.

But it won’t. It never does. You need a manager who’s got your back, and you need him now. Here are three arguments in three pictures.

Argument one: stock prices are too danged high.

This chart shows valuation of the US stock market back to 1880; numbers get really sketchy before that. Valuation, on the left axis, is the CAPE P/E ratio which tries to adjust for the fact that earnings tend to be “lumpy” so it averages them over time. The “mean” line is the average value over 140 years. The adjacent red lines mark the boundaries of one standard deviation from the normal. That reflects the prices you’d expect to see in two years out of three. If you get above the two S.D. line, those are once in 20 years prices. Three standard deviation prices should occur once in 300 years.

The U.S. market went over a CAPE P/E of 24 just three times in the 20^th century; it’s lived there in the 21^st. The market’s P/E at its February 2016 bottom was still higher than the P/E at its October 2007 top.

Argument two: Price matters.

If you overpay for something, whether it’s $72 million for a “franchise quarterback” who’s only started seven NFL games ever, or 115 years’ worth of earnings for a share of Netflix stock, you’re going to be disappointed.

The chart above reflects the stock market’s valuation (measured by the value of the stock market as a percentage of the value of the “real economy,” so when the blue line is high, stocks are relatively inexpensive) overlaid with its returns over the following 12 years. With considerable consistency, price predicts future returns. By this measure, U.S. stocks are priced to return 2% a year. The only ways for that number to go up is for the U.S. economy to grow at an eye-watering rate or for prices to come down. A lot. Based on the market’s performance over the past 60 years, the folks at the Leuthold Group find that a return to the valuations seen in the average bear market would require a fall of 30-40% from where we were at the end of March. Given that earnings have deteriorated and prices have risen in the 30 days since then, you might need to add a point or two to the decline.

Argument three: Market collapses are scary

I think of this as “the icicle chart.” Ben Carlson, one of the Ritholtz managers, wrote a really thoughtful essay, rich in visuals, in April. He posted it on his Wealth of Commonsense blog under the name “180 years of market drawdowns.” He provided this graph as an antidote to those relentlessly cheerful logarithmic “mountain charts.” Those are the ones that show the stock market’s relentless climb with just niggling little “oopsies” from time to time. Losing half your portfolio is, viewed from the perspective of a few decades or a century, just a minor annoyance. Losing half your portfolio is, viewed from the perspective of a guy who needs to meet a mortgage, fund a college education and plan for the end of a teaching career, rather a bigger deal. Mr. Carlson concludes:

…stocks are constantly playing mind games with us. They generally go up but not every day, week, month or year. No one can predict what the future returns will be in the market … But predicting future risk is fairly easy — markets will continue to fluctuate and experience losses on a regular basis.

Market losses are the one constant that don’t change over time — get used to it.

Managers who’ve got your back

There are only a handful of managers left who take all of that seriously. The rest have been driven to unemployment or retirement by the relentless demand: fully invested, price be damned. They typically follow a simple model: stock by stock, determine a reasonable price for everyone in our investable universe. Recognize that stocks are risky, so buy them only when they’re selling at a healthy discount to that price. Hold them until they’re around full value, then move on regardless of whether their prices are still rising. Get out while the getting is good. If you can’t find anything worth buying today, hold cash, keep your powder dry and know that the next battle awaits.

They bear a terrible price for hewing to the discipline. Large firms won’t employ them since large firms, necessarily, value “sticky assets” above all else. 99.7% of the investment community views them as relics and their investors steadily drift away in favor of “hot hands.”

They are, in a real sense, the individual investor’s best friends. They’re the people who are willing to obsess over stocks when you’d rather obsess over the NFL draft or the Cubs’ resurgence. And they’re willing, on your behalf, to walk away from the party, to turn away from the cliff, to say “no” and go. They are the professionals who might reasonably claim …

This chart reflects every equity-oriented mutual fund that currently has somewhere between “a lot” and “the vast majority” of their portfolio in cash, awaiting the return of good values. Here’s how to read it. The first two columns are self-explanatory. The third represents how their portfolios have been repositioned between 2011 (when there are still reasonable valuations) and now. Endurance, for example, had two-thirds of its money in stocks in 2011 but only a quarter invested now. The fourth column is fund’s annual return for the period noted (full market cycle or since inception). The fifth shows the fund’s Sharpe ratio, a measure of risk-adjusted returns, against its peers. The sixth column shows you how its performed, again relative to its peer group, in bear market months. The last column is the comparison time frame. I’ve marked decisive superiority in blue, comparable performance in amber and underperformance in red. All data is month end, March 2016.

	Style	Change in equity exposure from 2011 – 2016	Annual return	Sharpe ratio, compared to peers	Bear market rating, compared to peers	Comparison period
Intrepid Endurance ICMAX	Small-cap value	64%->24%	8.0%	0.64 vs 0.23	1 vs 6	FMC
Bruce BRUFX	Flexible	41 -> 46	7.2	0.56 vs 0.22	4 vs 6	FMC
FPA Crescent FPACX	Flexible	57 -> 52	6.0	0.54 vs 0.22	4 vs 6	FMC
Centaur Total Return TILDX	Equity-income	89 -> 40	7.4	0.51 vs 0.30	1 vs 5	FMC
Pinnacle Value PVFIX	Small-cap core	51 -> 52	3.9	0.41 vs 0.24	1 vs 6	FMC
Intrepid Disciplined Value ICMCX	Mid-cap value	81 -> 51	5.4	0.37 vs 0.29	1 vs 6	FMC
Frank Value FRNKX	Mid-cap core	83 -> 40	5.4	0.25 vs 0.27	1 vs 6	FMC
Hennessy Total Return HDOGX	Large-cap value, Dogs of the Dow	73 -> 51	3.4	0.24 vs 0.20	4 vs 4	FMC
Bread & Butter BABFX	Multi-cap value	69 -> 58	2.8	0.18 vs 0.21	1 vs 6	FMC
Funds with records >5 years but less than the full market cycle
Cook & Bynum COBYX	Global large-cap core	67% -> 54%	9.6%	1.21 vs 0.61	1 vs 6	08/2009
Castle Focus MOATX	Global multi-cap core	67 -> 66	7.5	1.02 vs 0.63	1 vs 6	08/2010
ASTON / River Road Independent  Value ARIVX	Small-cap value	49 -> 18	4.1	0.61 vs 0.50	1 vs 6	01/2011
Chou Opportunity CHOEX	Flexible	74 -> 51	1.4	0.07 vs 0.62	10 vs 6	08/2010
Two plausible benchmarks
Vanguard Total Stock Market VTSMX	Multi-cap core	100 -> 100	5.8%	0.32	4	FMC
Vanguard Balanced Index VBINX	Hybrid	60 -> 60	5.6%	0.52	1	FMC

There are four funds just beyond the pale: the funds have shorter records (though the managers often have long ones in other vehicles) but have disciplined investors at the helm and lots of cash on the books. They are:

Goodhaven GOODX

Hussman Strategic Dividend Value HSDVX

Linde Hansen Contrarian Value LHVAX

Poplar Forest Outlier PFOFX

No single measure is perfect and no strategy, however sensible, thrives in the absence of a sufficiently talented, disciplined manager. This is not a “best funds” list, much less a “you must buy it now, now, now!” list.

Bottom Line: being fully invested in stocks all the time is a bad idea. Allowing greed and fear, alternately, to set your market exposure is a worse idea.  Believing that you, personally, are magically immune from those first two observations is the worst idea of all.

You should invest in stocks only when you’ll be richly repaid for the astronomical volatility you might be exposed to.  Timing in and out of “the market” is, for most of us, far less reliable and far less rewarding than finding a manager who is disciplined and who is willing to sacrifice assets rather than sacrifice you. The dozen teams listed above have demonstrated that they deserve your attention, especially now.

 

Garbage in, garbage out: The 1/3/5/10 follies

On whole, we are not fans of reporting a fund’s one, three, five or even ten year records. In a dyspeptic moment I might suggest that the worship of standard reporting periods is universal, lunatic, destructive, obligatory, deluding, crippling, deranged, lazy, unwise, illogical and mayhap phantasmagoric.

On whole, I’d prefer that you not do it.

The easiest analogy might be to baseball. Here’s a quick quiz. Which of these statements is most meaningful to a baseball fan?

(a) My team won the last one, three and five innings!
(b) My team won the game.

We think it’s more useful to assess how a manager has performed over a full market cycle; that is, in good time and bad. The current market cycle began in October 2007, the day that the previous cycle reached its final peak and the market began its historic tumble. This cycle has included both a 51% loss for US large caps and a 223% rise. Folks who held on through both are up about 58% since the cycle began. That’s punky compared to the cycle that dominated the 1990s (up 533%) but durned fine compared to the cycle that ended in 2007 with a tiny 14% gain over seven years.

If you don’t judge your investments by meaningful measures, you cannot make meaningful decisions. Here’s a simple illustration.

If you look at the past 12 months, the Vanguard 500 Index is up 1.8% (through the end of March) and FPA Crescent is down 2.4%. Conclusion: Crescent sucks, buy the index!

Over the past three years, the 500 is up 39% and Crescent is up 18.6%. More sucking.

Over the past five years, the 500 is up 71% and Crescent is up 38%. Maximum suckage! But so far, we’re measuring only raw performance in the good times.

Over the course of the full market cycle, including the 2007-09 crash, Crescent is up 64% to the 500’s gain of 58%. More importantly, the index subjected its investors to a 51% decline compared to Crescent’s 29% drop. In bear market months, Crescent’s investors have slipped 7%, while the index investors dropped 11%.

We weigh the balance of your risks and returns by computing measures of risk-adjusted performance, such as the Sharpe and Martin ratios. Taking both halves of the equation (risk and return) into account and measuring performance over a meaningful period (the full market cycle), Crescent clubs the index.

	Sharpe	Martin	Ulcer Index
Crescent	0.54	0.72	7.9
Vanguard 500	0.32	0.30	17.6

Three quick points:

1. It’s easy to disastrously misjudge a fund when you rely on the wrong metrics; we think that arbitrary time periods and returns without consideration of risks are the disastrously wrong metrics.
2. It’s not just that funds like Crescent serve their investors better, it’s that funds such as Crescent serve long-term investors decisively better. Over time, they allow their investors to both eat well and sleep well.
3. The key is a manager’s willingness to let money walk out the door rather than betray his investors and his standards. In the late 1990s, GMO – a staunchly contrarian bunch who would not bend to the demands of investors blinded by the market’s 50-60% annual gains – lost over half of its assets. Crescent has lost $5 billion. Centaur, Intrepid, Pinnacle – all down by 50% or more all because they’ve refused to sell out to an increasingly narrow, extraordinarily overpriced bull market that’s approaching its eighth year.

Eight years of gains. Wow.

Had I mentioned, per Leuthold, that the only other bull market to reach its eight year anniversary ended in 1929?

Who has served their investors best?

Using Charles’s fund data screener at MFO Premium, I searched among the funds that predominately invest in U.S. equities for those with the highest risk-adjusted returns over the full market cycle.

This table shows the funds with the highest Sharpe ratios, along with supplemental risk-return measures. It’s sorted by Sharpe but I’ve also highlighted the top five funds (more in the case of a tie) in each measure with Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index added as a sort of universal benchmark.

		Category	Ulcer Index	Sharpe Ratio	Sortino Ratio	Martin Ratio
			Lower is better	Higher	Higher	Higher
Reynolds Blue Chip Growth	RBCGX	Multi-C Growth	5.9	0.68	1.15	1.76
Intrepid Endurance	ICMAX	SC Value	4.6	0.64	1.13	1.68
Monetta Young	MYIFX	Multi-C Core	10.6	0.6	0.97	0.91
AMG Yacktman Focused	YAFFX	LC Core	8.4	0.58	0.97	1.16
AMG Yacktman	YACKX	LC Core	9.2	0.57	0.94	1.01
Parnassus Core Equity	PRBLX	Equity Income	9.2	0.57	0.82	0.88
Bruce	BRUFX	Flexible Portfolio	12	0.56	0.81	0.57
First Trust Value Line Dividend Index	FVD	Multi-C Value	12.3	0.56	0.8	0.64
American Century NT Mid Cap Value	ACLMX	Multi-C Value	11.2	0.55	0.8	0.77
Intrepid Capital	ICMBX	Flexible Portfolio	6.3	0.55	0.82	0.94
Parnassus Endeavor	PARWX	Multi-C Core	10.9	0.55	0.86	0.94
Prospector Opportunity	POPFX	Mid-Cap Core	8.6	0.55	0.83	0.86
FPA Crescent	FPACX	Flexible Portfolio	7.9	0.54	0.77	0.72
Vanguard Dividend Growth	VDIGX	Equity Income	11	0.54	0.78	0.66
American Century Mid Cap Value	ACMVX	Multi-C Value	11.4	0.53	0.77	0.73
BBH Core Select	BBTEX	LC Core	9.4	0.53	0.77	0.76
Marsico Flexible Capital	MFCFX	Flexible Portfolio	13.5	0.52	0.8	0.65
Nicholas Equity Income	NSEIX	Equity Income	10.8	0.52	0.77	0.73
Centaur Total Return	TILDX	Equity Income	9	0.51	0.8	0.79
PRIMECAP Odyssey Aggressive Growth	POAGX	Mid-Cap Growth	15.8	0.51	0.79	0.66
Principal MidCap	PMBPX	Multi-C Growth	13.6	0.51	0.73	0.62
Fidelity Small Cap Discovery	FSCRX	SC Core	11.5	0.5	0.76	0.94
Nicholas	NICSX	Multi-C Growth	13	0.5	0.73	0.65
Pioneer Fundamental Growth	PIGFX	LC Growth	11.6	0.5	0.75	0.62
American Century Equity Income	TWEIX	Equity Income	11.1	0.48	0.68	0.5
For comparison
Vanguard Total Stock Market	VTSMX		17	0.32	0.46	0.32

Things that stand out:

1. Small, independent firms dominate the list. The ten largest fund complexes account for about two-thirds of the industry’s $18 trillion in assets. And yet, between them, they managed to produce two or three funds (depending on how you think about Primecap) on the list. American Century, a mid-sized firm, managed three. Intrepid, Nicholas, Parnassus and Yacktman each appeared twice and most appeared frequently on our top 50 list.
2. Active managers dominate the list. Only one index fund finished among the top 25. Only seven of the top 50 funds are passive products. If you sort by our most risk-sensitive measure, the Ulcer Index, only three passive products place in the top 50. Apparently “fully invested all the time” costs more than low fees save.
3. At most this is a place to start, not a place to end your inquiries. There are some truly excellent funds on the list and some whose presence might well be seriously misleading. Reynolds Blue Chip Growth, for instance, benefits a great deal by its decision to go entirely to cash before the market crashed in 2007. It outperformed its peers by 36% in the downturn but, other than for that one fortuitous move, has mostly trailed them in measures of both risk and return before and since.

Bottom line: The stock market, like war, is famous for “Months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” It’s those “moments of terror” that you’ve got to watch out for. That means you must look at how a manager serves you in both periods rather than limiting yourself to the “what have you done for me lately?” mindset.

My colleague Charles Boccadoro has been poring over oceans of data available through our premium fund screener. In the following story, he looks beyond the realm of individual funds to look for which fund families, including some fascinating smaller entrants, get it right most consistently.

Fund Family Scorecard

We started looking at fund family performance two years ago, first in June 2014 commentary with How Good Is Your Fund Family?, and then An Update in May 2015.

Below please find our MFO Family Fund Scorecard for May 2016, which reflects fund performance through 1st quarter. As a reminder, the card measures how well each fund in a family has performed against its peers since inception (or at least back to January 1960, which starts our Lipper database). Performance is absolute total return, reflecting reinvested dividends, but inclusive of fees and maximum front load, if applicable. The card groups families by quintile. (Download pdf version here.)

Some changes to methodology since last year:

• Categories now reflect those used by Lipper versus Morningstar, as discussed in Comparing Lipper Ratings. Similarly, all categories except money market are included, even so-called trading categories.
• Reduced from five to three the number of funds required to comprise a “fund family.” These changes respond to reader feedback from last year’s score card (eg., Where’s PRIMECAP?).
• Reduced from three years to just three months the minimum age for evaluation. Reasoning here being the desire to get heads-up of which young families are beating their peers out of the gate (eg., Grandeur Peak).

The result is about 400 “fund families,” or more precisely fund management companies; distilled from the 9,350 funds overall, oldest share class only.

We recognize the card is flawed from the start. Results can be skewed by multiple factors, including survivorship-bias, share class differences, “improper” categorization, adviser and fund ownership changes, multiple sub-advisers, and inconsistent time frames … three months is too short to matter, lifetime is too long to care.  Flaws notwithstanding, there is value in highlighting families that, for example, have not had a single fund beat its category average since inception. Like our legacy Three Alarm designation, prospective investors should ask: Why is that?

Take Saratoga Capital Management who is celebrating 20 years and offers a line-up of mutual funds as “The Portfolios of the Saratoga Advantage Trust.” From its brochure: “There are over 22,000 investment management firms in the United States. How do you choose the right one? Research, research and more research.” Fourteen of the funds offered in its line-up are managed by Saratoga itself. Average age: 15.6 years. How many have beaten average return in their respective categories? None. Zero. 0.

Fact is all seventeen funds in the Saratoga Advantage line-up have underperformed category average since inception. Why is that?

On a more positive note, a closer look at a couple groupings …

Good to see: Vanguard heads list of Top Families with Largest Assets Under Management (AUM), along with other shareholder friendly firms, like Dodge & Cox.

And, a nod to the young and unbeaten … a short list of top families where every fund beats its category average.

Gotham is led by renowned investor Joel Greenblatt. As for Grandeur Peak, David has been an outspoken champion since its inception. Below are its MFO Ratings (click image to enlarge):

MFO Fund Family Scorecard will soon be a regular feature on our Premium site, updated monthly, with downloadable tables showing performance and fund information for all families, like average ER, AUM, load, and shares classes.

All That Glitters …

By Edward Studzinski

One should forgive one’s enemies, but not before they are hanged.

Heinrich Heine

So, we are one-third through another year, and things still continue to be not as they should be, at least to the prognosticators of the central banks, the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, and those who make their livings reporting on same, at Bubblevision Cable and elsewhere. I am less convinced than I used to be that, for media commentators, especially on cable, the correct comparison is to The Gong Show. More often than not, I think a more appropriate comparison is to the skit performed by the late, great, and underappreciated Ernie Kovacs, “The Song of the Nairobi Trio.”

And lest I forget, this is the day after another of Uncle Warren’s Circuses, held in Omaha to capacity crowds. An interesting question there is whether, down the road some fifty years, students of financial and investing history discover after doing the appropriate first order original source research, that what Uncle Warren said he did in terms of his investment research methodology and what he in reality did, were perhaps two different things. Of course, if that were the case, one might wonder how all those who have made almost as good a living selling the teaching of the methodology, either through writing or university programs, failed to observe same before that. But what the heck, in a week where the NY Times prints an article entitled “Obama Lobbies for His Legacy” and the irony is not picked up on, it is a statement of the times.

The best performing asset class in this quarter has been – gold. Actually the best performing asset class has been the gold miners, with silver not too far behind. We have had gold with a mid-teen’s total return. And depending on which previous metals vehicle you have invested in, you may have seen as much as a 60%+ total return (looking at the germane Vanguard fund). Probably the second best area generically has been energy, but again, you had to choose your spots, and also distinguish between levered and unlevered investments, as well as proven reserves versus hopes and prayers.

I think gold is worth commenting on, since it is often reviled as a “barbarous relic.” The usual argument against it that it is just a hunk of something, with a value that goes up and down according to market prices, and it throws off no cash flow.

That argument changes of course in a world of negative interest rates, with central banks in Europe and one may expect shortly, parts of Asia, penalizing the holding of cash by putting a surcharge on it (the negative rate).

A second argument against it is that is often subject to governmental intervention and political manipulation. A wonderful book that I still recommend, and the subjects of whom I met when I was involved with The Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, is The Predictors by Thomas A. Bass. A group of physicists used chaos theory in developing a quantitative approach to investing with extensive modeling. One of the comments from that book that I have long remembered is that, as they were going through various asset and commodity classes, doing their research and modeling, they came to the conclusion that they could not apply their approach to gold. Why? Because looking at its history of price movements, they became convinced that the movements reflected almost always at some point, the hand of government intervention. An exercise of interest would be to ponder how, over the last ten years, at various points it had been in the political interests of the United States and/or its allies, that the price of gold in relation to the price of the dollar, and those commodities pegged to it, such as petroleum, had moved in such a fashion that did not make sense in terms of supply and demand, but made perfect sense in terms of economic power and the stability of the dollar. I would suggest, among other things, one follow the cases in London involving the European banks that were involved in price fixing of the gold price in London. I would also suggest following the timetable involving the mandated exit of banks such as J.P. Morgan from commodity trading and warehousing of various commodities.

Exeunt, stage left. New scenario, enter our heroes, the Chinese. Now you have to give China credit, because they really do think in terms of centuries, as opposed to when the next presidential or other election cycle begins in a country like the U.S. Faced with events around 2011 and 2012 that perhaps may have seemed to be more about keeping the price of gold and other financial metrics in synch to not impact the 2012 elections here, they moved on. We of course see that they moved on in a “fool me once fashion.” We now have a Shanghai metals exchange with, as of this May, a gold price fixing twice a day. In fact, I suspect very quickly we will see whole set of unintended consequences. China is the largest miner of gold in the world, and all of its domestic supply each year, stays there. As I have said previously in these columns, China is thought to have the largest gold reserves in the world, at in excess of 30,000 tons. Russia is thought to be second, not close, but not exactly a slouch either.

So, does the U.S. dollar continue as the single reserve currency (fiat only, tied solely to our promise to pay) in the world? Or, at some point, does the Chinese currency become its equal as a reserve currency? What happens to the U.S. economy should that come to pass? Interesting question, is it not? On the one hand, we have the view in the U.S. financial press of instability in the Chinese stock market (at least on the Shanghai stock exchange), with extreme volatility. And on the other hand, we have Chinese companies, with some degree of state involvement or ownership, with the financial resources to acquire or make bids on large pieces of arable land or natural resources companies, in Africa, Australia, and Canada. How do we reconcile these events? Actually, the better question is, do we even try and reconcile these events? If you watch the nightly network news, we are so self-centered upon what is not important or critical to our national survival, that we miss the big picture.

Which brings me to the question most of you are asking at this point – what does he really think about gold? Some years ago, at a Grant’s Interest Rate Observer conference, Seth Klarman was one of the speakers and was asked about gold. And his answer was that, at the price it was at, they wanted to have some representation, not in the physical metal itself, but in some of the gold miners as a call option. It would not be more than 5% of a portfolio so that in the event it proved a mistake, the portfolio would not be hurt too badly (the opposite of a Valeant position). If the price of gold went up accordingly, the mine stocks would perhaps achieve a 5X or 10X return, which would help the overall returns of the portfolio (given the nature of events that would trigger those kinds of price movements). Remember, Klarman above all is focused on preserving capital.

And that is how I pretty much view gold, as I view flood insurance or earthquake insurance. Which, when you study flood insurance contracts you learn does not just cover flooding but also cases of extreme rain where, the house you built on the hill or mountain goes sliding down the hill in a massive mudslide. So when the catastrophic event can be covered for a reasonable price, you cover it (everyone forgets that in southern Illinois we have the New Madrid fault, which the last time it caused a major quake, made recent California or Japanese events seem like minor things). And when the prices to cover those events become extreme, recognizing the extreme overvaluation of the underlying asset, you should reconsider the ownership (something most people with coastal property should start to think about).

Twenty-odd years ago, when I first joined Harris Associates, I was assigned to cover DeBeers, the diamond company, since we were the largest shareholders in North America. I knew nothing about mining, and I knew nothing about diamonds, but I set out to learn. I soon found myself in London and Antwerp studying the businesses and meeting managements and engineers. And one thing I learned about the extractive industries is you have to differentiate the managements. There are some for whom there is always another project to consume capital. You either must expand a mine or find another vein, regardless of what the price of the underlying commodity may be (we see this same tendency with managements in the petroleum business). And there are other managements who understand that if you know the mineral is there sitting in the ground, and you have a pretty good idea of how much of it is there, you can let it sit, assuming a politically and legally stable environment, until the return on invested capital justifies bringing it out. For those who want to develop this theme more, I suggest subscribing to Grant’s Interest Rate Observer and reading not just its current issues but its library of back issues. Just remember to always apply your own circumstances rather than accept what you read or are told.

Drafting a Fixed Income Team

By Leigh Walzer

It is May 1. The time of flowers, maypoles and labor solidarity.

For football fans it is also time for that annual tradition, the NFL draft.  Representatives of every professional football team assemble in Chicago and conspire to divide up the rights to the 250 best college players.  The draft is preceded by an extensive period of due diligence.

Some teams are known to stockpile the best available talent. Other teams focus on the positions where they have the greatest need; if there are more skilled players available at other positions they try to trade up or down to get the most value out of their picks. Others focus on the players who offer the best fit, emphasizing size, speed, precision, character, or other traits.

The highly competitive world of professional sports offers a laboratory for investors selecting managers. Usually at Trapezoid we focus on finding the most skillful asset managers, particularly those with active styles who are likely to give investors their money’s worth. In the equity world, identifying skill is three quarters of the recipe for investment success.

But when we apply our principles to fixed income investing, the story is a little different.  The difference in skill between the top 10% and bottom 10% is only half as great as for the equity world. In other words, time spent looking for the next Jeff Gundlach is only half as productive as time spent looking for the next Bill Miller.

Exhibit I

That assumes you can identify the good fixed income managers.  Allocators report the tools at their disposal to analyze fixed income managers are not as good as in equities.

Some people argue that in sports, as in investing, the efficient market hypothesis rules. The blog Five-thirty-eight argues that  No Team Can Beat the Draft. General managers who were seen as geniuses at one point in their career either reverted to the mean or strayed from their discipline.

Readers might at this point be tempted to simply buy a bond ETF or passive mutual fund like VTBXX. Our preliminary view is that investors can do better. Many fixed income products are hard to reproduce in indices; and the expense difference for active management is not as great. We measure skill (see below) and estimate funds in the top ten percentile add approximately 80 basis points over the long haul; this is more than sufficient to justify the added expense.

However, investors need to think about the topic a little differently. In fixed income, skillful funds exist but they are associated with a fund which may concentrate in a specific sector, duration, and other attributes.  It is often not practical to hedge those attributes – you have to take the bundle.  Below, we identify n emerging market debt fund which shows strong skill relative to its peers; but the sector has historically been high-risk and low return which might dampen your enthusiasm. It is not unlike the highly regarded quarterback prospect with off-the-field character issues.

When selecting managers, skill has to be balanced against not only the skill and the attractiveness of the sector but also the fit within a larger portfolio. We are not football experts. But we are sympathetic to the view that the long term success of franchises like the New England Patriots is based on a similar principle: finding players who are more valuable to them than the rest of the league because the players fit well with a particular system.

To illustrate this point, we constructed an idealized fixed income portfolio. We identified 22 skilled bond managers and let our optimizer choose the best fund allocation. Instead of settling upon the manager with the best track record or highest skill, the model allocated to 8 different funds. Some of those were themselves multi-sector funds. So we ended up fairly diversified across fixed income sectors.

Exhibit  I
Sector Diversification in one Optimized Portfolio

Characteristics of a Good Bond Portfolio

We repeated this exercise a number of times, varying the choice of funds, the way we thought of skill, and other inputs. We are mindful that not every investor has access to institutional classes and tax-rates vary. While the specific fund allocations varied considerably with each iteration, we observed many similarities throughout.:

BUSINESS CREDIT: Corporate bonds received the largest allocation; the majority of that went to high yield and bank loans rather than investment grade bonds

DON’T OVERLOAD ON MUNIs. Even for taxable investors, municipal funds comprised only a minority of the portfolio.

STAY SHORT: Shorter duration funds were favored. The example above had a duration of 5.1 years, but some iterations were much shorter

DIVERSIFY, UP TO A POINT:  Five to eight funds may be enough.

Bond funds are more susceptible than equity funds to “black swan” events. Funds churn out reliable yield and NAV holds steady through most of the credit cycle until a wave of defaults or credit loss pops up in an unexpected place.  It is tough for any quantitative due diligence system to ferret out this risk, but long track records help. In the equity space five years of history may be sufficient to gauge the manager’s skill. But in fixed income we may be reluctant to trust a strategy which hasn’t weathered a credit crunch. It may help to filter out managers and funds which weren’t around in 2008. Even then, we might be preparing our portfolio to fight the last war.

Identifying Skilled Managers

The recipe for a good fixed income portfolio is to find good funds covering a number of bond sectors and mix them just right. We showed earlier that fixed income manager skill is distributed along a classic bell curve. What do we mean by skill and how do we identify the top 10%? 

The principles we apply in fixed income are the same as for equities but the methodology is the same. While the fixed income model is not yet available on our website, readers of Mutual Fund Observer may sample the equity model by registering at www.fundattribution.com.  We value strong performance relative to risk. While absolute return is important, we see value in funds which achieve good results while sitting on large cash balances – or with low correlation to their sectors. And we look for managers who have outperformed their peer group -or relevant indices – preferably over a long period of time.  We also consider the trend in skill.

For fixed income we currently rely on a fitted regression model do determine skill. A few caveats are in order. This approach isn’t quite as sophisticated as what we do with equity funds. We don’t use the holdings data to directly measure what the manager is up to, we simply infer it. We don’t break skill down into a series of components. We rely on gross performance of subsectors rather than passive indices.  We haven’t back-tested this approach to see whether it makes relevant predictions for future periods.  And we don’t try to assess the likelihood that future skill will exceed expenses.  Essentially, the funds which show up well in this screen outperformed a composite peer group chosen by an algorithm over a considerable period of time. While we call them skillful, we haven’t ruled out that some were simply lucky. Or, worse, they could be generating good performance through a strategy which back to bite them in the long term. For all the reasons noted earlier, quantitative due diligence of portfolio managers has limitations. Ultimately, it pays to know what is inside the credit “black box”

Exhibit II lists some of the top-ranking funds in some of the major fixed income categories. We culled these from a list of 2500 fixed income funds, generally seeking top-decile performance, AUM of at least $200mm, and sufficient history with the fund and manager. 

We haven’t reviewed these funds in detail. Readers with feedback on the list are welcome to contact me at [email protected]

From time to time, the media likes to anoint a single manager as the “bond king.” But we suggest that different shops seem to excel in different sectors. Four High Yield funds are included in the list led by Osterweis Strategic Income Fund (OSTIX).  In the Bank Loan Category several funds show better but Columbia Floating-Rate Fund (RFRIX) is the only fund with the requisite tenure. The multi-sector funds listed here invest in corporate, mortgage, and government obligations.  We are not familiar with Wasatch-Hoisington US Treasury Fund (WHOSX), but it seems to have outperformed its category by extending its duration.

FPA New Income Fund (FPNIX) is categorized with the Mortgage Funds, but 40% of its portfolio is in asset-backed securities including subprime auto.  Some mortgage-weighted funds with excellent five year records who show up as skillful but weren’t tested in the financial crisis or had a management change were excluded. Notable among those is TCW Total Return Bond Fund (TGLMX).

Skilled managers in the municipal area include Nuveen (at the short to intermediate end), Delaware, Franklin, and Blackrock (for High Yield Munis).

Equity

Style diversification seems less important in the equity area. We tried constructing a portfolio using 42 “best of breed” equity funds from the Trapezoid Honor Roll.  Our optimizer proposed investing 80% of the portfolio in the fund with the highest Sharpe Ratio. While this seems extreme, it does suggest equity allocators can in general look for the “best available athlete” and worry less about portfolio fit.

Bottom Line

Even though fixed income returns fall in a narrower range than their equity counterparts, funds whose skill justify their expense structure are more abundant. Portfolio fit and sector timeliness sometimes trumps skill; diversification among fixed income sectors seems to be very important; and the right portfolio can vary from client to client. If in doubt, stay short. Quantitative models are important but strive to understand what you are investing in.

The Alt Perspective: Commentary and news from DailyAlts.

April has come to a close and another Fed meeting has passed without a rate rise. At the same time, markets have continued to rally with the equity market, as measured by the S&P 500 Index, gaining another 0.39% in April, bringing the 3-month total return to 7.05%. Bonds also rallied as the Barclays U.S. Aggregated Bond Index gained 0.38% in April, and 2.02% over the past 3-months. Not bad for traditional asset classes.

Strong rallies are periods when alternative strategies lag the broad markets given that they are often hedged in their exposure to traditional asset classes. And this is what we saw in April, with managed futures funds dropping 1.76%, bear market funds losing 1.36% and market neutral funds shedding 0.40%. At the same time, long/short equity funds eked out a gain of 0.06%, multi-alternative funds gained 0.29%, non-traditional bond funds gained 1.54% and multi-currency funds added 1.57%. Not a stellar month for alternative funds, but investors can’t always make money in all areas of their portfolio – diversification has its benefits as well as its drawbacks.

News Highlights from April

• Highland Capital, who had originally filed to launch a series of 17 alternative ETFs, decided to take a different course of action and shut down the 3 hedge fund replication ETFs it launched less than a year ago. It’s unlikely any of the remaining 14 funds will see the bid or ask of a trade.
• Morningstar has made some modifications to its alternative fund classifications, creating two new alternative fund categories: Long/Short Credit and Option Writing. The changes went into effect on April 29.
• Alternative fund (mutual funds and ETFs) inflows continued to be positive in March, with nearly $2.1 billion of new assets going into the category. Managed futures funds gained just over $1 billion in assets and multi-alternative funds picked up nearly $500 million, but the big gainer was volatility based funds which added $1.5 billion as a category.
• Both Calamos and Catalyst hit the market this month with new alternative mutual funds what were converted from hedge funds. Calamos launched a global long/short equity fund managed by Phineus Partners, a firm they acquired in 2015, while Catalyst launched a hedged equity (with an alpha overlay) fund (this one is a bit more complicated on the surface) that is sub-advised by Millburn Ridgefield.
• Fidelity Investments did an about face on more than $2 billion of assets allocated to two multi-alternative mutual funds that were set up specifically, and exclusively, for their clients. One fund was managed by Blackstone, while the other by Arden Asset Management (which was recently acquired by Aberdeen).

Potential Regulatory Changes

One of the more serious issues currently on the table is a proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to limit the use of derivatives and leverage in mutual funds. Keith Black, Managing Director of Curriculum and Exams for the CAIA Association, wrote a good piece for Pensions & Investments that covers some of the key issues. In the article, Black states that if the regulations are passes as is, it will “substantially alter the universe of alternative strategy funds available to investors.” While not expected to be implemented in its current form, fund managers are nevertheless concerned. The limitations proposed by the SEC would severely constrain some fund managers in their ability to implement the investment strategies they use today, and that would not be limited just to managers of alternative funds.

Greater levels of transparency and more sensible reporting are certainly needed for many funds. This is an initiative that funds should undertake themselves, rather than wait for the regulators to force their hand. But greater limits on the use of derivatives and leverage would, in many cases, go against the grain of benefiting investors.

Observer Fund Profiles: ARIVX and TILDX

Each month the Observer provides in-depth profiles of between two and four funds.  Our “Most Intriguing New Funds” are funds launched within the past couple years that most frequently feature experienced managers leading innovative newer funds.  “Stars in the Shadows” are older funds that have attracted far less attention than they deserve. 

Aston River Road Independent Value (ARIVX). If James Brown is the godfather of soul, then Eric Cinnamond might be thought the godfather of small cap, absolute value investing. He’s been at it since 1996 and he suspects that folks who own lots of small cap stocks today are going to want to sell them to him, for a lot less than they paid, sooner rather than later.

Centaur Total Return (TILDX). If Steppenwolf (“I like smoke and lightnin’ / Heavy metal thunder”) was born to be wild, then Zeke Ashton was born to be mild (“thoughtless risk now damages future performance”). While Steppenwolf’s name is cool, Mr. Ashton’s combination of blue chips, cash and calls has been far more profitable (and, of course, prudent).

Launch Alert: LMCG International Small Cap

LMCG International Small Cap (ISMRX/ISMIX) launched on April 1, 2016 but it’s actually a new platform for an institutional “collective trust” that’s been in operation since August 26, 2010.

LMCG Investments is a Boston-based adviser with about $7 billion of mostly institutional and high net worth individual assets. They were once “Lee Munder Capital Group” and they do subadvise some retail funds but they are not linked to the old Munder family of funds.

The fund invests primarily in international small cap stocks from developed markets, though they can invest small slices in both the US and the emerging markets. “Small cap” translates to market caps between $50 million and $7 billion with the current weighted capitalization in the portfolio at $2.9 billion. They target companies with “good growth prospects and high quality of earnings,” then buy them when they’re attractively valued. They position themselves as a quant fund with a fundamentalist’s bias; that is, they’ve constructed screens to help them identify the same attributes that other good fundamental, bottoms-up guys look for. They screen 2,500 stocks daily and are hopeful that the quantitative discipline helps them avoid a lot of human errors such as style drift and overcommittment to particular stocks. Eventually the portfolio will hold between 90-125 more-or-less equally weighted stocks.

Four things stand out about the fund:

1.   It’s cheap.

Morningstar’s benchmarking data is too cute by half since they provide separate group benchmarks for load and no-load funds, institutional and non-institutional funds and both category average and “Fee Level Comparison Group Median” numbers. In general, you’d expect to pay somewhere between 1.35% and 1.50% for a fund in this category. With an opening e.r. of 1.10%, LMCG will be one of the four cheapest options for retail investors.

2.   It’s in an arena where active managers thrive.

Standard & Poor’s SPIVA scorecards track the prospect that an active manager will outperform his benchmark. In domestic small cap core funds, the chance is about 1 in 7 over a five year period. For international small cap core, though, the chance is 1 in 2 and that’s despite the generally high expenses that the average fund carries. More to the point, funds like Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Small Cap Index (VFSVX) are distinctly poor performers, trailing 90% of their peers over the past three- and five-year periods.

3.   It’s got an experienced management team.

The fund is managed by Gordon Johnson, who has 23 years of experience managing global portfolios and developing quantitative investment models. Before joining LMCG in 2006 he had six years at Evergreen Investments and, before that, managed the Colonial Fund. (And, like me, he has a PhD from UMass.) Co-manager Shannon Ericson joined LMCG at the same time, also from Evergreen, and has had stints at Independence International Associates and Mellon Trust. Together they also co-manage LMCG Global Market Neutral Fund, ASTON/LMCG Emerging Markets and PACE International Emerging Markets.  They’re assisted by Daniel Getler, CFA.

4.   It’s got a strong track record.

The predecessor fund has been around since 2010 and it has outperformed its peer group and its benchmark index in each of the five calendar years of its existence.

It’s particularly interesting that the fund has been more than competitive in both up- and down-market years.

The fund’s initial expense ratio is 1.10%, after waivers, on Investor class shares and 0.85% on Institutional ones.  The minimum initial investment is $2500 for Investor shares and $100,000 for the others. 

The ISMRX homepage is, understandably, thin on the content right now. The other funds’ homepages (Global Multicap and Global Market Neutral) aren’t exactly founts of information, but they do offer the prospect for a factsheet, manager Q&A and such as forthcoming. The LMCG homepage does offer access to their monthly commentary, LMCG Unfiltered. It’s short, clear and interesting. There was an note in their March 2016 issue that over the past eight years, US corporations have accounted for a slightly higher percentage of global corporate earnings (up from 36% in 2007 and 41% in 2015) but a substantially higher percentage of global stock market capitalization (from 47% to 59%). That suggests that the US market has been underwritten by the willingness of international investors to overpay for the safe haven of US markets and raises intriguing questions about what happens when there’s no longer a safe haven premium.

Funds in Registration

Before mutual funds can offered for sale to the public, their prospectuses and related documents need to be subject to SEC review for 75 days. During the so-called “silent period,” the prospectus is available for public (and regulator) review, but the advisers are not permitted to discuss them. We try to track down no-load retail funds and actively-managed ETFs in registration that you might want to put on your radar.

There are only five funds in registration now, most set to launch by the end of June.

While it’s not likely to lead to scintillating cocktail party conversation, DoubleLine Ultra Short Bond Fund is apt to be really solid and useful. And it is run by Bonnie Baha, who once asked The Jeffrey why he was such a jerk.

AMG SouthernSun Global Opportunities Fund is a sort of global version of SouthernSun Small Cap (SSSFX). Okay, it’s a sort of smid-cap global version of Small Cap. SSSFX tends to be a high-beta fund that captures a lot more of the upside than its peers; that boldness has hurt it lately but is has serious charms.

Manager Changes

We’ve track down rather more than 55 manager changes this month, including maternity leaves, sabbaticals, retirements and quietly unexplained departures. The most noteworthy might be the departure of Daniel Martino from T. Rowe Price New America Growth Fund (PRWAX).

Updates

Welcoming Bob Cochran

It is with undisguised, and largely unrestrained, glee that we announce the addition of Robert Cochran to the Mutual Fund Observer, Inc. Board of Directors. Bob is the lead portfolio manager, Chief Compliance Officer, and a principal of PDS Planning in Columbus, Ohio.

We’ve been following Bob’s posts for the past 10 or 15 years where, as BobC, he’s been one of the most respected, thoughtful and generous contributors to our discussion board and the FundAlarm’s before that. The Observer aspires to serve two communities: the small, independent managers who are willing to stray from the herd and who are passionate about what they do (rather than about how much they can make) and the individual investors who deserve better than the timid, marketing-driven pap they’re so often fed. As we begin our sixth year, we thought that finding someone who is both active in the industry and broad in mind and spirit would allow us to serve folks better.

We believe that Bob is a great fit there. He’s been a financial professional for the past 31 years (he earned his CFP the same year I earned my PhD), writes thoughtfully and well, and had a stint teaching at Humboldt State in Arcata, a lovely town in northern California. He also serves on the Board for the Columbus Symphony (and was formerly their principal bassoonist) and Neighborhood Services, Inc., one of Ohio’s oldest food banks. Had I mentioned he’s prepping a national display garden? Me, I mostly buy extra bags of shredded hardwood mulch to bury my mistakes.

We are delighted that Bob agreed to join us, hopeful that we’ll be able to chart a useful course together, and grateful to him, and to you all, for your faith in us.

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On being your own worst enemy

Chuck Jaffe, in “This is why mutual fund managers can’t beat a stock index more often” (April 14, 2016), meditated a bit upon the question of whether index funds and sliced bread belong in the same pantheon. He notes that while the easy comparisons favor index funds, there’s a strongly countervailing flow that starts with the simple recognition that 50% of funds must, by definition, underperform the group average. The question is, can you find the other 50%. Research by several large firms points in that direction. Fidelity reports that low-cost funds from large fund complexes are grrrrrrreat! American Funds reports that low cost funds with high levels of manager ownership are at least as great. My take was simpler: you need to worry less about whether your active fund is going to trail some index by 0.9% annually and worry more about whether you will, yet again, insist on being your own worst enemy:

“Your biggest risk isn’t that your manager will underperform, it’s that you’ll panic and do something stupid and self-destructive,” said David Snowball, founder of MutualFundObserver.com. “With luck, if you know what your manager is doing and why she’s doing it and if she communicates clearly and frequently, there’s at least the prospect that you’ll suppress the urge to self-immolation.”

On April 29, 2016, Morningstar added eight new fund categories, bringing their total is 122.The eight are:

They renamed 10 other categories. The most noticeable will be the replacement of conservative, moderate and aggressive allocation categories with stipulations of the degree of market exposure. The moderate allocation category, once called “balanced,” is now the “Allocation 50-70% Equity” category.

Briefly Noted . . .

With unassailable logic that Aristotle himself would affirm, we learn from a recent SEC filing that “The Aristotle Value Equity Fund has not commenced operations and therefore is currently not available for purchase.”

Effective April 1, 2016, QS Batterymarch Financial Management, Inc. merged with QS Investors, LLC, to form QS Investors, LLC. QS was an independent quant firm purchased, in 2014, by Legg Mason to run their QS Batterymarch funds.

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

AMG SouthernSun Small Cap Fund (SSSFX) reopened to new investors in the first week of April.

On April 7, 2016, the Board of Trustees of Crow Point Defined Risk Global Equity Income Fund (CGHAX/CGHIX) voted to abandon the plan of liquidation for the Fund and continue the Fund’s operations.

The Board of Trustees voted to reduce the expense cap on Dean Mid Cap Value Fund (DALCX) by 1.50% to 1.10%. That includes a small drop in the management fee.

Franklin Biotechnology Discovery Fund (FBDIX) will re-open to new investors May 16, 2016. The fund’s 23% loss in the first four months of 2016 might have created some room for (well, need for) new investors.

RS Partners Fund (RSPFX) reopened to new investors on March 1, 2016, just in case you’d missed it. RS, once Robertson Stephens, has been acquired by Victory Capital, so the fund may be soon renamed Victory RS Partners.

Sequoia Fund (SEQUX) has reopened in hopes of finding new investors. I won’t be one of them. There’s the prospect of a really substantial tax hit this year. In addition, we still don’t know what happened, whether it’s been fixed and whether the folks who left – including the last of the original managers – were the cause of the mess or the scapegoats for it. Until there’s some clarity, I’d be unwilling to invest for the sake of just owning a legendary name.

WCM Investment Management has voluntarily agreed to waive all of its fees and pay all of the operating expenses for WCM Focused Global Growth Fund (WFGGX) and WCM Focused Emerging Markets Fund (WFEMX) from May 1, 2016, through April 30, 2017. “The Advisor will not seek recoupment of any advisory fees it waived or Fund expenses it paid during such period.”

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

AC Alternatives® Market Neutral Value Fund (ACVQX) will close to new investors on May 25, 2016 except those who invest directly with American Century or through “certain financial intermediaries selected by American Century.” In an exceedingly odd twist, Morningstar describes it as having “average” returns, a fact belied by, well, all available evidence. In addition to beating their peers in every calendar year, the performance gap since inception is pretty substantial:

Folks closed out here and willing to consider an even more explosive take on market-neutral investing might want to look at Cognios Market Neutral Large Cap (COGIX).

Effective April 30, 2016, the Diamond Hill Small-Mid Cap Fund (DHMAX), with $1.8 billion in assets, closed to most new investors. 

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

On or about May 31, 2016, each Strategic Advisers^® Multi-Manager Target Date Fund becomes a Fidelity Multi-Manager Target Date Fund.

The Primary Trend Fund has become Sims Total Return Fund (SIMFX). Sims Capital Management has been managing the fund since 2003 and just became the adviser, rather than just the sub-adviser. I wish them well, but the fact that they’ve trailed their peers in eight of the past 10 calendar years is going to make it a hard slog.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Appleton Group Risk Managed Growth Fund (AGPLX) has closed and will be liquidated at the close of business on June 27, 2016.

Aurora Horizons Fund (AHFAX) closed to new purchases on April 22, 2016 and will be liquidating its assets as of the close of business on May 31, 2016. As this alts fund passed its three-year mark, it was trailing 80% of its peers.

BPV Low Volatility Fund (BPLVX) has closed but “will continue to operate until on or about May 31, 2016, when it will be liquidated.” The fund is liquidating just as Morningstar is creating a category to track such option-writing strategies.

The Braver Tactical Opportunity Fund (BRAVX) has closed to new investors and will discontinue its operations effective May 27, 2016. It’s not at all a bad fund, it’s just not magical. Increasingly, it seems like that’s what it takes.

Stepping back from the edge of the grave: On March 30, 2016, the Board of Trustees of Two Roads Trust voted to abandon the plan of liquidation for the Breithorn Long/Short Fund (BRHIX) that was scheduled to occur on or about April 8, 2016. 

Fidelity Advisor Short Fixed-Income Fund (FSFAX) is merging into Fidelity Short-Term Bond Fund (FSHBX) on or about July 15, 2016. Their performance over any reasonable time frame is nearly identical and FSHBX is cheaper, so it’s a clear winner for shareholders.

Nuveen Global Growth (NGGAX) and Nuveen Tradewinds Emerging Markets (NTEAX) funds will both be liquidated after the close of business on June 24, 2016.

Oppenheimer Commodity Strategy Total Return Fund (QRAAX) will liquidate on June 29, 2016. While the fund has almost $300 million in assets, its watershed moment might have happened in 2008:

Driven by the adviser’s “its inability to market the Fund and [fact] that it does not desire to continue to support the Fund,” Outfitter Fund (OTFTX) and its fly-fishing logo will liquidate on or about May 26, 2016.

Panther Small Cap Fund (PCGSX) will be liquidated on or about May 16, 2016. Cool name, no assets, quickly deteriorating performance.

Putnam Voyager Fund (PVOYX) is merging into Putnam Growth Opportunities (POGAX) on July 15, 2016. Voyager’s performance was rightly described as “dismal” by Morningstar. Voyager’s manager was replaced in February by Growth Opportunities, after a string of bad bets: in the past six years, he mixed one brilliant year with two dismal ones and three pretty bad ones. He was appointed in late 2008 just before the market blasted off, rewarding all things risky. As soon as that phase passed, Voyager sank in the mud. To their credit, Voyager’s investors stayed with the fund and assets, still north of $3 billion, have only recently begun to slip. The new combined fund’s manager is no Peter Lynch, but he’s earning his keep.

Rivington Diversified International Equity Fund By WHV and Rivington Diversified Global Equity Fund By WHV have been closed and liquidated. “By WHV” sounds like a bad couture brand.

Stratus Government Securities (STGAX) and Growth Portfolio (STWAX) are both moving toward liquidation. Shareholders will rubberstamp the proposal on June 7, 2016.

The Board of Trustees, citing in light of “the ever-present goal of continuing to make all decisions and actions in the Best Interests of the Shareholders,” has decided to liquidate Valley Forge Fund (VAFGX). 

A queer and wonderful ride. Bernie Klawans – an aerospace engineer – ran it for decades, from 1971-2011, likely out of his garage. One-page website, no 800-number, no reports or newsletters or commentaries. Also an incredibly blurry logo that might well have been run through a mimeograph machine once or twice. Mr. Klawans brought on a successor when he was in his late 80s, worked with him for a couple years, retired in April and passed away within about six months. Then his chosen successor, Craig Arnholt, died unexpectedly within a year. The Board of Trustees actually managed the fund for six months (quite successful – they beat both their LV peers and the S&P) before finding a manager who’d run the fund for a pittance. The new guy was doing fine then … kapow! He lost 22% in September and October of 2014, when the rest of the market was essentially flat. That was a combination of a big stake in Fannie and Freddie – adverse court ruling cut their market value by half in a month – and energy exposure. He’s been staggering toward the cliff ever since.

Tocqueville Alternative Strategies Fund (TALSX) will “liquidate, dissolve and terminate [its] legal existence,” all on May 17, 2016. The fund is better than its three year record looks: it’s had two bad quarters in the last three, but often moved in the opposite direction of other alt funds and had a solid record up until Q3 2015.

William Blair Directional Multialternative Fund closed and liquidated on April 21, 2016.

William Blair Large Cap Value Fund (WLVNX) has closed and will liquidate on or about June 15, 2016. Soft performance, $3 million in assets, muerte.

In Closing . . .

Mutual Fund Observer celebrates its fifth anniversary with this issue. Our official launch was May 1, 2011 and since then we’ve enjoyed the company of nearly 800,000 readers (well, 795,688 seems like it’s near 800,000). Each month now we draw between 22,000 and 28,000 readers.

Thanks and thanks and more thanks to… David, Michael, William, and Richard. Many thanks, also, to John from California who sent a note with his donation that really brightened our day. As always, Gregory and Deb, your ongoing support is so appreciated.

If you’re grateful at the absence of ads or fees and would like to help support the Observer, there are two popular options. Simple: make a tax-deductible contribution to the Observer. Folks contributing $100 or more in a year receive access to MFO Premium, the site that houses our custom fund screener and all of the data behind our stories.

Simplest: use our link to Amazon.com. We received about 6-7% of the value of anything you purchase through that link. It costs you nothing extra and is pretty much invisible. For those of you interested in knowing a bit more about the Observer’s history, scope and mission, we’ve linked our factsheet to the thumbnail on the left.

As usual, we’ll be at the Morningstar Conference, 13-15 June. Let us know if we might see you there.

Our June issue will be just a wee bit odd for the Observer. At the end of May I’m having one of those annoying round-number birthdays. I decided that, on whole, it would be substantially less annoying if I celebrated it somewhere even nicer than the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities. The Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland, in particular. Chip saw it as an opportunity to refine her palate by trying regional varieties of haggis (and scotch), so she agreed to join me for the adventure.

That means we’ll have to finish the June issue by May 20^th, just about the time that some hundreds of students insist on graduating from our respective colleges. We’ll have the issue staged before we leave the country and will count on her IT staff to launch it. That means we’ll be out of contact for about two weeks, so we’ll have to ask for forbearance for unanswered email.

As ever,

By David Snowball

Dear friends,

Sorry about the late launch of the Observer, but we’ve been consumed by the need to deal with a campus crime.

Someone stole the dome off my academic home, Old Main, early on the morning of April 1st.

The barstids!

If you play the accompanying video (probably best with the sound muted), there are some way cool images of the pre-theft dome which occur around the: 45 second mark. It’s accompanied by some commentary by a couple of my students and my colleague, Wendy, who, like Anakin, has heard the song of the Dark Side.

Requiem for a heavyweight

The sad tale of Sequoia’s (SEQUX) unwinding continues.

Here’s the brief version of recent events:

• Investors have pulled more than a half billion from the fund, including $230 million just in the first three weeks of March. March will be the sixth consecutive month of net withdrawals.
• The fund trails 98-100% of its peers for 2015 and 2016, as well as for the past one- and three-year periods.
• Manager Bob Goldfarb, whose name is on the door at Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb, resigned and an unnamed analyst who was one of the cheerleaders for Valeant left.
• The remaining guys have had a period of reflection and propose a more collaborative decision-making model and less risk-taking for the years ahead.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg (served 1928-1951), a Republican committed to the critical importance of a united front when it came to foreign policy, famously declared “politics stops at the water’s edge.” The fear is that the Sequoia version might have been “independence stops at the boss’s door.”

The dark version of the Sequoia narrative would be this: Goldfarb, abetted by an analyst, became obsessed about Valeant and crushed any internal dissent. Mr. Poppe, nominally Mr. Goldfarb’s peer, wouldn’t or couldn’t stop the disaster. “All the directors had repeatedly expressed concern” over the size of the Valeant stake and the decision to double-down on it. Mr. Poppe dismissed their concerns: “recent events frustrated them.” The subsequent resignations by 40% of the board, with another apparently threatening to go, were inconsequential annoyances. Sequoia, rather snippily, noted that board members don’t control the portfolio, the managers do. Foot firmly on the gas, they turned the bus toward the cliff.

If the dark version is right, Jaffe is wrong. The headline on a recent Chuck Jaffe piece trumpeted “How a big bet on one bad stock broke a legendary mutual fund” (3/28/2016). If the dark narrative is right, “One bad stock” did not break Sequoia; an arrogant and profoundly dysfunctional management culture did.

Do you seriously think that you’d be braver? In the wake of Josef Stalin’s death, Nicolas Khrushchev gave a secret speech denouncing the horrors of Stalin’s reign and his betrayal of the nation. Daniel Schorr picks up the narrative: It was said that at one point a delegate shouted, “And Nikita Sergeyevich, where were you while all this was happening?” Khrushchev had looked up and snapped, “Who said that? Stand up!” When no one rose, Khrushchev said, “That’s where I was, comrade” (from Daniel Schorr, Stay Tuned (2001), 75-76).

Another version, though, starts with this question: “did Goldfarb fall on his sword?” His entire professional life has been entwined with Sequoia, the last living heir to the (Bill) Ruane, (Richard) Cunniff and Goldfarb legacy. Ruane and Cunniff started the firm in 1970, Goldfarb joined the next year and has spent 45 years at it. And now it was all threatening to come apart. Regardless of “who” or “why,” some dramatic gesture was called for. If the choice came down to Goldfarb, age 71, or Poppe, at 51 or 52, it was fairly clear who needed to draw his gladius.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects rushed to close the barn door.

• Morningstar reduced the fund’s Analyst Rating from Gold to Bronze. Why? In the same way that a chef might be embarrassed to celebrate the tender delights of a fish flopping around on the ground, Morningstar’s analysts might have been embarrassed to look at an operation whose wheels were coming off and declaring it “the best of the best.”

  Oddly, they also placed it “under review” on October 30, 2015. At that point, Valeant was over 30% of the fund, investors had been pulling money and the management team conducted their second, slightly-freakish public defense of their Valeant stake. Following the review, the analysts reaffirmed their traditional judgment: Gold! The described it as “compelling” in the week before the review and “a top choice” in the week afterward.

  There’s no evidence in the reaffirmation statement that the analysts actually talked to Sequoia management. If they didn’t, they were irresponsible. If they did and asked about risk management, they were either deceived by management (“don’t worry, we’re clear-eyed value investors and we’re acting to control risk”) or management was honest (“we’re riding out the storm”) and the analysts thought “good enough for us!” I don’t find any of that reassuring.

  Doubts have only set in now that the guys presumably responsible for the mess are gone and the management strategy is becoming collaborative and risk-conscious.

  Similarly, up until quite recently Morningstar’s stock analyst assigned to Valeant recognized “near-term pain” while praising the firms “flawless execution” of its acquisition strategy and the “opportunities [that] exist for Valeant long term.”

• Steve Goldberg, an investment advisor who writes for Kiplinger’s, “still had faith in the fund” back in October after the board members resigned and the extent of the Valeant malignancy was clear. But “What I didn’t know: Valeant was no Berkshire Hathaway.” (stunned silence) Uh, Steve, maybe you should let someone else hold the debit card, just to be safe? Mr. Goldberg correctly points out that Bill Nygren, manager of Oakmark Select (OAKLX), stubbornly rode his vast holdings in Washington Mutual all the way to zero. The lesson he’s learned, curiously late in his professional investing career, “I need to make sure a fund isn’t taking excessively large positions in one or two stocks or engaging in some other dicey strategy. Dramatically outsize returns almost never come without outsize risks.”

The excuse “we couldn’t have known” simply does not hold water. A pseudonymous contributor to Seeking Alpha, who describes himself only as “an engineer in Silicon Valley” wrote a remarkably prescient, widely ignored critique of Sequoia two years ago. After attending Sequoia’s Investor Day, he came away with the eerie sense that Rory Priday and Bob Goldfarb spoke most. The essay makes three prescient claims: that Valeant hadn’t demonstrated any organic growth in years, that they’d been cooking the books for years, and that Goldfarb and Priday were careless in their statements, inexperienced in pharma investing and already hostage to their Valeant stake.

Valeant’s largest shareholder, [Sequoia’s] fate has become inextricably intertwined with Valeant. Valeant is 23% of their portfolio and they own 10% of Valeant. They can’t exit without ruining their returns. This led to a highly desperate defense at the Ruane, Cunniff, Goldfarb annual meeting.

If an amateur investor could smell the rot, why was it so hard for professionals to? The answer is, we blind ourselves by knowing our answers in advance. If I start with the conclusion, “you can’t do much better than the legendary Sequoia,” then I’ll be blind, deaf and dumb on their behalf for as long as I possibly can be.

The bottom line: start by understanding the risks you’re subjecting yourself to. We ignore risks when times are good, overreact when times are bad and end up burned at both ends. If you can’t find your manager’s discussion of risk anywhere except in the SEC-mandated disclosure, run away! If you do find your manager’s discussion of risk and it feels flippant or jaded (“all investing entails risk”), run away! If it feels incomplete, call and ask questions of the advisors. (Yes, people will answer your questions. Trust me on this one.) If, at the end of it all, you’re thinking, “yeah, that makes sense” then double-check your understanding by explaining the risks you’re taking to someone else. Really. Another human being. One who isn’t you. In my academic department, our mantra is “you haven’t really learned something until you’ve proven you can teach it to someone else.” So give yourself that challenge.

Quick note to Fortune: Help staff get the basics right

In Jen Wieczner’s March 18, 2016 story for Fortune, she warns “Sequoia Fund, a mutual fund once renowned for its stock-picking prowess, has been placed under review by Morningstar.” The stakes are high:

Uhh, no. Morningstar is not Michelin. Their stars are awarded based on a mathematical model, not an analyst’s opinions (“This Valeant investor is in even bigger trouble than Bill Ackman,” Fortune.com. The error was corrected eventually).

The Honorable Thing

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

               George Santayana

So we find one chapter at Sequoia Fund coming to a close, and the next one about to begin.  On this subject my colleague David has more to offer. I will limit myself to saying that it was appropriate, and, the right thing to do, for Bob Goldfarb to elect to retire. After all, it happened on his watch. Whether or not he was solely to blame for Valeant, we will leave to the others to sort out in the future. Given the litigation which is sure to follow, there will be more disclosures down the road.

A different question but in line with Mr. Santayana’s observations above, is, do those responsible for portfolio miscues, always do the honorable thing? When one looks at some of the investment debacles in recent years – Fannie and Freddie, Sears, St. Joe, Valeant (and not just at Sequoia), Tyco, and of course, Washington Mutual (a serial mistake by multiple firms)  – have the right people taken responsibility? Or, do the spin doctors and public relations mavens come in to do damage control? Absent litigation and/or whistle blower complaints, one suspects that there are fall guys and girls, and the perpetrators live on for another day. Simply put, it is all about protecting the franchise (or the goose that is laying the golden eggs) on both the sell side and the buy side. Probably the right analogy is the athlete who denies using performance enhancing drugs, protected, until confronted with irrefutable evidence (like pictures and test results).

Lessons Learned

Can the example of the Sequoia Fund be a teaching moment? Yes, painfully. I have long felt that the best way to invest for the long-term was with a concentrated equity portfolio (fewer than twenty securities) and some overweight positions within that concentration. Looking at the impact Sequoia has had on the retirement and pension funds invested in it, I have to revisit that assumption. I still believe that the best way to accumulate personal wealth is to invest for the long-term in a concentrated portfolio. But as one approaches or enters retirement, it would seem the prudent thing to do is to move retirement moneys into a very diverse portfolio or fund.  That way you minimize the damage that a “torpedo” stock such as Valeant can do to one’s retirement investments, and thus to one’s standard of living, while still reaping the greater compounding effects of equities. There will still be of course, market risk. But one wants to lessen the impact of adverse security selection in a limited portfolio. 

Remember, we tend to underestimate our life expectancy in retirement, and thus underweight our equity allocations relative to cash and bonds. And in a period such as we are in, the risk free rate of return from U.S. Treasuries is not 12% or 16% as it was in the early 1980’s (although it is perhaps higher than we think it is). And for that retirement equity position, what are the choices?  Probably the easiest again, is something like the Vanguard Total Stock Market or the Vanguard S&P 500 index funds, with minimal expense ratios. We have been talking about this for some time now, but Sequoia provides a real life example of the adverse possibilities.  And, it is worth noting that almost every concentrated investment fund has underperformed dramatically in recent years (although the reasons may have more to do with too much money chasing too few and the same good ideas). Is it really worth a hundred basis points to pay someone to own Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, as their top twenty holdings? Take a look sometime at the top twenty holdings of the largest actively managed funds in the respective categories of growth, growth and income, etc., and see what conclusions you draw.

The more difficult issue going forward will be deflation versus inflation. We have been in a deflationary world for some time now. It is increasingly apparent that the global central banks are in the process (desperately one suspects) to reflate their respective economies out of stagnant or no growth. Thus we see a variety of quantitative easing measures which tend to favor investors at the expense of savers. Should they succeed, it is unlikely that the inflation will stop at their targets (2% here), and the next crisis will be one of currency debasement. The more things change.

Gretchen Morgenson, Take Two

As should be obvious by now, I am a fan of Ms. Morgenson’s investigative reporting and her take no prisoners approach. I don’t know her from Adam, and could be standing next to her in the line for a bagel and coffee in New York and would not know it. But, she has a wonderful knack for goring many of the oxen that need to be gored.

In this Sunday’s New York Times Business Section, she raised the question of the effectiveness of share buybacks. Now, the dirty little secret for some time has been that growth of a business is not impacted by share repurchases. Yet, if you listened to many portfolio managers wax poetic about how they only invest with shareholder friendly managements (which in retrospect turn out to have not been not so shareholder friendly after they have been indicted by a grand jury). Share repurchase does increase per share metrics, such as book value and earnings.  While the pie stays the same size, the size of the pieces changes. But often in recent years, one wonders why the number of shares outstanding does not change after a repurchase of what looked to have been 5% or so of shares outstanding during the year. 

Well, that’s because management keeps awarding themselves options, which are approved by the board. And the options have the effect of selling the business incrementally to the managers over time, unless share purchases eliminate the dilution from issuing the options.  Why approve the options packages? Well, the option packages are marketed to the share owners as critical to attracting and retaining good managers, AND, aligning the interests of management with the interests of shareholders. Which is where Mr. Santayana comes in  –  the bad (for shareholders) is made to look good with the right buzzwords.

However, I think there is another reason. Obviously growing a business is one of the most important things a management can do with shareholder capital. But today, every capital allocation move of reinvesting in a business for growth and expansion directly or by acquisition, faces a barrage of criticism. The comparison is always against the choices of dividends or share repurchase. I think the real reason is somewhat more mundane. 

The quality of analysts on both the buy and sell side has been dumbed down to the point that they no longer know how to go out and evaluate the impact of an acquisition or other growth strategy. They are limited to running their spread sheet models against industry statistics that they pull off of their Bloomberg terminals. I remember the horror with which I was greeted when I suggested to an analyst that perhaps his understanding of a company and its business would improve if he would find out what bars near a company’s plants and headquarters were favorites of the company’s employees on a Friday after work and go sit there. Now actually I wasn’t serious about that (most of the analysts I knew lacked the social graces and skills to pull it off). I was serious about getting tickets to industry tradeshows and talking to the competitor salespeople at their booths.  You would be amazed about how much you can learn about a company and its products that way. And people love to talk about what they do and how it stands up against their competition. That was a stratagem that fell on deaf ears because you actually had to spend real dollars (rather than commission dollars), and you had to spend time out of the office. Horrors!  You might have to miss a few softball games.

The other part of this is managements and the boards, which also have become deficient at understanding the paths of growing and reinvesting in a business that was entrusted to them.

Sadly, what we have today is a mercenary class of professional managers who can and will flit from opportunity to opportunity, never really understanding (or loving) the business. And we also have a mercenary class of professional board members, who spend their post-management days running their own little business – a board portfolio. And if you doubt all of this, take a look again at Valeant and the people on the board and running the business. It was and is a world of consultants and financial engineers, reapplying the same case study or stratagem they had used many times before. The end result is often a hollowed-out shell of a company, looking good to appearances but rotting away on the inside.

By Edward Studzinski.

Steve Romick: A bit more faith is warranted

In our March issue, I reflected on developments surrounding three of the funds in which I’m invested: FPA Crescent (FPACX), my largest holding, Artisan Small Cap Value (ARTVX), my oldest holding, and Seafarer Overseas Growth & Income (SFGIX), my largest international holding. I wrote that two things worried me about FPA Crescent:

First, the fund has ballooned in size with no apparent effort at gatekeeping … Second, Romick blinked.

That is, the intro to his 2015 Annual Report appeared to duck responsibility for poor performance last year. My bottom line on FPA was “I’ve lost faith. I’m not sure whether FPA is now being driven by investment discipline, demands for ideological purity or a rising interest in gathering assets. Regardless, I’m going.”

Ryan Leggio, now a senior vice president and product specialist for FPA but also a guy who many of you would recall as a former Morningstar analyst, reached out on Mr. Romick’s behalf. There were, they believed, factors that my analysis hadn’t taken into account. The hope was that in talking through some of their decision-making, a fuller, fairer picture might emerge. That seemed both generous and thoughtful, so we agreed to talk.

On the question of Crescent’s size, Mr. Romick noted that he’d closed the fund before (from 2005-08) and would do so again if he thought that was necessary to protect his shareholders and preserve the ability to achieve their stated goal of equity-like rates of return with less risk than the market over the long-term. He does not believe that’s the case now. He made three points:

1. His investable universe has grown. That plays out in two ways: he’s now investing in securities that weren’t traditionally central to him and some of his core areas have grown dramatically. To illustrate the first point, historically, Mr. Romick purchased a security only if its potential upside was at least three times greater than its potential downside. He’s added to that an interest in compounders, stocks with the prospect of exceedingly consistent if unremarkable growth over time. Similarly, they continue to invest in mid-cap stocks, which are more liquid than small caps but respond to many of the same forces. Indeed, the correlation between the Vanguard Small Cap (NAESX) and Mid Cap (VIMSX) index funds soared after the late 1990s and is currently .96. At the same time, the number of securities in some asset classes has skyrocketed. In 2000, there was $330 billion in high-yield bonds; today that’s grown to $1.5 trillion. In an economic downturn, those securities can be very attractively priced very quickly.

2. His analytic and management resources have grown. For his first 15 years, Mr. Romick basically managed the fund alone. In recent years, as some of the long-time partners came toward the ends of their careers, FPA “reinvested in people in a very big way which has given me a very large, high capability team.” That culminated in the June 2013 appointment of two co-managers, Mark Landecker and Brian Selmo. Mr. Landecker was previously a portfolio Manager at Kinney Asset Management in Chicago and Arrow Investments. Mr. Selmo founded and managed portfolios for Eagle Lake Capital, LLC, and was an analyst at Third Avenue and Rothschild, Inc. They’re supported by six, soon to be seven analysts, a group that he calls “a tremendously strong team.”

3. Managing a closed fund is not as straightforward as it might appear. Funds are in a constant state of redemption, even if it’s not net Investors regularly want some of their money back to meet life’s other needs or to pursue other opportunities. When a fund is successful and open to new investors, those redemptions can be met – in whole or in large part – from new cash coming in. When a fund is closed, redemptions are met either from a fund’s cash reserves (or, more rarely, a secured line of credit) or from selective liquidation of securities in the portfolio. In bad times, the latter is almost always needed and plays havoc with both tax efficiency and portfolio positioning.

So, on whole, he argues that Crescent is quite manageable at its current size. While many fund managers have chosen to partially close their funds to manage inflows, Mr. Romick’s strategy is simply not to market it and allow any growth to be organic. That is, if investors show up, then fine, they show up. FPA has only two full-time marketers on payroll supporting six open-end mutual funds. While Romick speaks a lot to existing shareholders, his main outreach to potential shareholders is limited to stuff like speaking at the Morningstar conference.

While he agreed that Crescent was holding a lot of cash, reflecting a dearth of compelling investment opportunities, he’s willing to take in more money and let the fund grow. In explaining this rationale, he reflected on the maxim, “Winter is coming,” a favorite line from his daughter’s favorite television show. “The problem,” he said, “is that they never tell you when winter is coming. Just that it is. That’s the way I feel about the bond market today.” He made a point that resonated with Edward Studzinski’s repeated warnings over the past year: liquidity has been drained from the corporate bond market, making it incredibly fragile in the face of a panic. In 2007, for example, the market-makers had almost $300 billion in cash to oil the workings of the bond market; today, thanks to Dodd-Frank, that’s dwindled to less than $30 billion even as the high-yield and distressed securities markets – the trades that would most require the intervention of the market-makers – have ballooned.  Much more market, much less grease; that’s a bad combination.

On the question of dodging responsibility, Mr. Romick’s response is simple. “We didn’t try to duck. We just wrote a paragraph that didn’t effectively communicate our meaning.” They wrote:

At first glance, it appears that we’ve declined as much as the market — down 11.71% since May 2015’s market peak against the S&P 500’s 11.30% decline — but that’s looking at the market only through the lens of the S&P 500. However, roughly half of our equity holdings (totaling almost a third of the Fund’s equity exposure) are not included in the S&P 500 index. Our quest for value has increasingly taken us overseas and our portfolio is more global than it has been in the past. We therefore consider the MSCI ACWI a pertinent alternative benchmark.

My observation was that you didn’t “appear to decline” as much as the stock market; you in actual fact did decline by that much, and a bit more. Mr. Romick’s first reflection was to suggest substituting “additional” for “alternative” benchmark. As the conversation unfolded, he and Mr. Leggio seemed to move toward imagining a more substantial rewrite that better caught their meaning. I might suggest:

We declined as much as the S&P 500 – down 11.71% from the May 2015 market peak to year’s end, compared to the S&P’s 11.30% decline. That might seem especially surprising given our high cash levels which should buffer returns. One factor that especially weighed against us in the short term is the fund’s significant exposure to international securities. Those markets had suffered substantially; from the May market peak, the S&P500 dropped 11.3% but international stocks (measured by the Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund) declined 23.5%. We are continuing to find interesting opportunities overseas and may add the global MSCI ACWI index as an additional benchmark to help you judge our performance.

So where does that leave us? Three things seem indisputable:

1. Crescent is still a large fund. As I write this (3/10/16), Morningstar reports that Crescent has $16.6 billion in assets, well down from its $20.5 billion 2015 peak. A year ago it was larger and still growing. Now, it’s both smaller and FPA expects “modest outflows” in the year ahead. This still makes it one of the hundred largest actively managed funds, the ninth largest “moderate allocation” fund (Morningstar) and the third-largest “flexible portfolio” fund (Lipper). The larger funds tend to be multi-manager beasts from huge complexes such as American Funds, BlackRock, Fidelity, Price and Vanguard.

   On the upside, its equity positions have still managed to beat the S&P 500 in five of the past seven calendar years.

2. Crescent is led by a very talented manager. His recognition as Morningstar’s 2013 Asset Allocation Fund Manager of the Year is one of those “scratch the surface” sorts of statements. He’s beaten his Morningstar peers in eight of the past 10 years; the fund leads 99% of its peers over the past 15 years. Morningstar describes him as “one of the most accomplished” managers in the field and he routinely ends up on lists of stars, masters and gurus. He’s managed Crescent for just under a quarter century which creates a well-documented record of independence and success. While we have no independent record for his co-managers, we also have no reason to doubt their ability.

3. Crescent is not the fund it once was. It’s no longer a small fund driven by one guy’s ability to find and exploit opportunities in small and mid-cap stocks or other small issues. In the course of reflecting on the general failure of flexible funds, a rule to which Crescent is the exception, John Rekenthaler offered a graphic representation of the fund’s evolution over the past decade:

   The size of the dot reflects the size of the fund. The position of the dot reflects the positioning of the stock portion of the portfolio. Tiny dot with the black circle was Crescent a decade ago; big dot with the black circle is today. Currently, 82% of the fund’s stocks are characterized by Morningstar as “large” or “giant,” with more giants than merely large caps. The average market cap is just north of $50 billion. According to Mr. Romick, these securities are more reflective of the opportunity set based on valuations, than a byproduct of the Fund’s size.

   The unanswered question is whether the new Crescent remains a peer of the old Crescent. Over the past 15 years, Crescent has beaten 99% of its peers and it’s beaten them by a huge margin.

I don’t think the fund will be capable of reprising that dominance; conditions are too different with both the fund and the market. The question, I suppose, is whether that’s a fair standard? Likely not.

The better question is, can the fund consistently and honorably deliver on its promise to its investors; that is, to provide equity-like returns with less risk over reasonable time periods? Given that the management team is deeper, the investment process is unimpaired and its size is has become more modest, I think the answer is “yes.” Even if it can’t be “the old Crescent,” we can have some fair confidence that it’s going to be “the very good new Crescent.”

Share Classes

Last month, David Offered Without Comment: Your American Funds Share Class Options. The simple table showing 18 share classes offered for one of AF’s fixed income funds generated considerable comment via Twitter and other media, including good discussion on the MFO Discussion Board.

We first called attention to excessive share classes in June 2014 with How Good Is Your Fund Family?  (A partial update was May 2015.) American Funds topped the list then and it remains on top today … by far. It averages more than 13 share classes per unique fund offering.

The following table summarizes share class stats for the largest 20 fund management companies by assets under management (AUM) … through February 2016, excluding money market and funds less than 3 months old.

At the end of the day, share classes represent inequitable treatment of shareholders for investing in the same fund. Typically, different share classes reflect different expense ratios depending on initial investment amount, load or transaction fee, or association of some form, like certain 401K plans. Here’s a link to AF’s web page explaining Share Class Pricing Details. PIMCO’s site puts share class distinction front and center, as seen in its Products/Share Class navigator below, a bit like levels of airline frequent flyer programs:

We’ve recently added share class info to MFO Premium’s Risk Profile page. Here’s an example for Dan Ivascyn’s popular Income Fund (click on image to enlarge):

In addition to the various differences in 12b-1 fee, expense ratio (ER), maximum front load, and initial purchase amount, notice the difference in dividend yield. The higher ER of the no-load Class C shares, for example, comes with an attendant reduction in yield. And, another example, from AF, its balanced fund:

Even Vanguard, known for low fees and equitable share holder treatment, provides even lower fees to its larger investors, via so-called Admiral Shares, and institutional customers. Of course, the basic fees are so low at Vanguard that the “discount” may be viewed more as a gesture.

The one fund company in the top 20 that charges same expenses to all its investors, regardless of investment amount or association? Dodge & Cox Funds.

We will update the MFO Fund House Score Card in next month’s commentary, and it will be updated monthly on the MFO Premium site.

Shake Your Money Market

By Leigh Walzer

Reports of the death of the money market fund (“MMF”) are greatly exaggerated. Seven years of financial repression and 7-day yields you can only spot under a microscope have made surprisingly little dent in the popularity of MMF’s. According to data from the Investment Company Institute, MMF flows have been flat the past few years. The share of corporate short term assets deposited in MMFs has remained steady.

However, new regulations will be implemented this October, forcing MMFs holding anything other than government instruments to adopt a floating Net Asset Value. These restrictions will also allow fund managers to put up gates during periods of heavy outflows.

MMFs were foundational to the success of firms like Fidelity, but today they appear to be marginally profitable for most sponsors. Of note, Fidelity is taking advantage of the regulatory change to move client assets from less remunerative municipal MMFs to government money market funds carrying higher fees (management fees net of waived amounts.)

While MMFs offer liquidity and convenience, the looming changes may give investors and advisors an impetus to redeploy their assets. In a choppy market, are there safe places to park cash?  A popular strategy over the past year has been high-dividend / low-volatility funds. We discussed this in March edition of MFO. This strategy has been in vogue recently but with a beta of 0.7 it still has significant exposure to market corrections.

Short Duration Funds:  Investors who wish to pocket some extra yield with a lower risk profile have a number of mutual fund and ETF options. This month we highlight fixed income portfolios with durations of 4.3 years or under.

We count roughly 300 funds with short or ultraShort Duration from approximately 125 managers. Combined assets exceed 500 billion dollars.  Approximately one quarter of those are tax-exempt.  For investors willing to risk a little more duration, illiquidity, credit exposure, or global exposure there are roughly 1500 funds monitored by Trapezoid.

Duration is a measure of the effective average life of the portfolio. Estimates are computed by managers and reported either on Morningstar.com or on the manager’s website. There is some discretion in measuring duration, especially for instruments subject to prepayment.  While duration is a useful way to segment the universe, it is not the only factor which determines a fund’s volatility.

Reallocating from a MMF to a Short Duration fund entails cost. Expenses average 49 basis points for Short Term funds compared with 13 basis points for the average MMF.  Returns usually justify those added costs. But how should investors weigh the added risk. How should investors distinguish among strategies and track records? How helpful is diversification?

To answer these questions, we applied two computer models, one to measure skill and another to select an optimal portfolio.

We have discussed in these pages Trapezoid’s Orthogonal Attribution Engine which measures skill of actively managed equity portfolio managers. MFO readers can learn more and register for a demo at www.fundattribution.com. Our fixed income attribution model is a streamlined adaptation of that model and has some important differences. Among them, the model does not incorporate the forward looking probabilistic analysis of our equity model. Readers who want to learn more are invited to visit our methodology page. The fixed income model is relatively new and will evolve over time.

We narrowed the universe of 1500 funds to exclude not only unskilled managers but fund classes with AUM too small, duration too long, tenure too short (<3 years), or expenses too great (skill had to exceed expenses, adjusted for loads, by roughly 1%). We generally assumed investors could meet institutional thresholds and are not tax sensitive. For a variety of reasons, our model portfolio might not be right for every investor and should not be construed as investment advice.

DoubleLine Total Return Bond (DBLTX), MassMutual Premier High Yield Fund (MPHZX), and PIMCO Mortgage Opportunities Fund (PMZIX) all receive full marks from Morningstar and Lipper (except in the area of tax efficiency.)  Diversifying among credit classes and durations is a benefit – but the model suggests these three funds are all you need.

Honorable Mentions: The model finds Guggenheim Total Return Bond Fund (GIBIX) is a good substitute for DBLTX and Shenkman Short Duration High Income Fund (SCFIX) is a serviceable substitute for MPHZX. We ran some permutations in which other funds received allocations. These included: Victory INCORE Fund for Income (VFFIX), Nuveen Limited term Municipal Bond (FLTRX), First Trust Short Duration High Income Fund (FDHIX), Guggenheim Floating Rate Strategies (GIFIX), and Eaton Vance High Income Opportunities Fund (EIHIX). 

The Trapezoid Model Portfolio generated positive returns over a 12 and 36-month time frame. (Our data runs through January 2016.) The PIMCO Mortgage fund wasn’t around 5 years ago, but it looks like the five-year yield would have been close to 6%.

The portfolio has an expense ratio of 53 basis points. Our algorithms reflect Trapezoid’s skeptical attitude to high cost managers.  There are alternative funds in the same asset classes with expense ratios of 25 basis points of better. But superb performance more than justifies the added costs. Our analysis suggests the rationale for passive managers like Vanguard is much weaker in this space than in equities. However, investors in the retail classes may see higher expenses and loads which could change the analysis.

No Return Without Risk: How much risk are we taking to get this extra return? The duration of this portfolio is just under 3.5 years.  There is some corporate credit risk: MPHZX sustained a loss in the twelve months ending January. It is mostly invested in BB and B rated corporate bonds. To do well the fund needs to keep credit loss under 3%/yr.  Although energy exposure is light, we see dicey credits including Valeant, Citgo, and second lien term loans. The market rarely gives away big yields without attaching strings.

The duration of this portfolio hurt returns over the past year. What advice can we give to investors unable to take 3.5 years of duration risk? We haven’t yet run a model but we have a few suggestions.

1. For investors who can tolerate corporate credit risk, Guggenheim Floating Rate Strategies (GIFIX) did very well over the past 5 years and weathered last year with only a slight loss.
2. A former fixed income portfolio manager who now advises clients at Merrill Lynch champions Pioneer Short Term Income Fund (PSHYX). Five-year net return is only 2.2%, but the fund has a duration of only 0.7 years and steers clear of corporate credit risk.
3. A broker at Fidelity suggested Touchstone UltraShort Duration Fixed Income Fund (TSDOX) which has reasonable fees and no load.

Short Duration funds took a hit during the subprime crisis.  At the trough bond fund indices were down 7 to 10% from peak, depending on duration. Funds with concentrations in corporate credit and mortgage paper were down harder while funds like VFFIX which stuck to government or municipal bonds held up best. MassMutual High Yield was around during that period and fell 21% (before recovering over the next 9 months.) The other two funds were not yet incepted; judging from comparable funds the price decline during the crisis was in the mid-single digits. Our model portfolio is set up to earn 2.5% to 3% when rates and credit losses are stable. Considering that their alternative is to earn nothing, investors deploying cash in Short Duration funds appear well compensated, even weighing the risk of a once-in-a-generation 10% drawdown.

Bottom Line: The impact of new money market fund regulations is not clear. Investors with big cash holdings have good alternatives.  Expenses matter but there is a strong rationale for selecting active managers with good records, even when costs are above average.  Investors get paid to take risk but must understand their exposure and downside. A moderate amount of diversification among asset classes seems to be beneficial. Our model portfolio is a good starting point but should be tailored to the needs of particular investors.

The Alt Perspective: Commentary and news from DailyAlts.

For anyone who enjoys roller coasters, Q1 2016 was for you. While it seemed a bit wild at times, it was really just a trip down to the bottom of a trough, and a consistent tick back up to where we started. Thanks to a coordinated plan of attack on part of global sovereign bankers, and reiterated by new policy actions from the European Central Bank, the markets shrugged off early losses in the year with a very solid recovery in March. As they say, don’t fight the Fed. And in this case, don’t fight the globally coordinated Fed.

Let’s first take a look at how alternative funds faired in the bull month of March.

Performance

The returns for the month of March were positive, except for managed futures and bear market funds. Commodities led the way over the month, while bear market funds got hammered with the strong rally in equities. Managed futures struggled to add value as markets tended to be one directional in March.

Commodities Broad Basket        4.32%

Long/Short Equity  2.53%

Multicurrency         2.52%

Nontraditional Bond         1.65%

Multialternative      1.27%

Market Neutral       0.46%

Managed Futures    -2.79%

Bear Market  -10.86%

Cleary, equity based alternative strategies, such as long/short equity, struggled to keep up with the strong rally in March, however, nontraditional bond funds performed well relative to their long-only counterpart (Intermediate Term Bonds). Below are a few traditional mutual fund categories:

Large Blend (US Equity)    6.37%

Foreign Large Blend         6.86%

Intermediate Term Bond  1.30%

Moderate Allocation        4.72%

Data Source: Morningstar

Research

Two interesting pieces of research emerged over the month. The first is from an investment advisor in La Jolla, California, called AlphaCore Capital. In a piece written by their director of research, they highlight the importance of research and due diligence when choosing alternative investment managers (or funds) – not because the strategies are more complex (which is also a reason), but because the range of returns for funds in each category is so wide. This is called “dispersion,” and it is a result of the investment strategies and the resulting returns of funds in the same category being so different. Understanding these differences is where the expertise is needed.

The second piece of research comes from Goldman Sachs. In their new research report, they note that liquid alternatives outperformed the pricier hedge funds across all five of the major categories of funds they track. While the comparative results in some categories were close, the two categories that stood out with significant differences were Relative Value and Event Driven. In both cases, alternative mutual funds outperformed their hedge fund counterparts by a wide margin.

Fund Liquidations

Nineteen alternative mutual funds were liquidated over the quarter, with seven of those in March. Most notably, Aberdeen (the new owner of the fund-of-hedge fund firm Arden Asset Management) closed down the larger of the two Arden multi-alternative funds, the Arden Alternative Strategies Fund (ARDNX). The fund had reached a peak of $1.2 billion in assets back in November 2014, but lackluster performance in 2015 put the fund on the chopping block.

In addition to the Arden fund, Gottex Fund Management (another institutional fund-of-hedge funds, as is Arden) liquidated their only alternative mutual fund, the Gottex Endowment Strategy Fund (GTEAX), after losing nearly 6% in 2015. Both of these closures create concerns about the staying power and commitment by institutional alternative asset management firms. And both come on the back of other similar firms, such as Collins Capital and Whitebox (the latter being a hedge fund manager), who both liquidated funds in February.

Where to from here?

Challenging performance periods always serve to clean out the underperformers. In many ways, Q1 served as a housecleaning quarter whereby funds that wrapped up 2015 with few assets and/or below average (or well-below average) performance took the opportunity to shut things down. A little housecleaning is always good. Looking forward, there is significant opportunity for managers with strong track records, compelling diversification, and consistent management teams.

Alternative investment strategies, and alternative asset classes, both have a role to play in a well-diversified portfolio. That fact hasn’t changed, and as more financial advisors and individual investors grow accustom to how these strategies and asset classes behave, the greater the uptake will be in their portfolios.

Be well, stay diversified and do your due diligence.

Observer Fund Profiles:

Each month the Observer provides in-depth profiles of between two and four funds.  Our “Most Intriguing New Funds” are funds launched within the past couple years that most frequently feature experienced managers leading innovative newer funds.  “Stars in the Shadows” are older funds that have attracted far less attention than they deserve. 

AQR Equity Market Neutral (QMNIX) and AQR Long-Short Equity (QLEIX): our colleague Sam Lee, principal of Severian Asset Management, offers a close assessment of two institutional AQR funds. The bottom line is: “AQR does long-short investing right. Check these out.”

Intrepid Endurance (ICMAX): at 70% cash, what’s to like? Well, the highest Sharpe ratio of any small cap fund – domestic, global, or international – of the course of the full market cycle. Also the lower Ulcer Index. And peer-beating returns. Heck, what’s not to like?

Otter Creek Long/Short Opportunity (OTCRX): we’d describe the young Otter Creek fund as “pure alpha” – it has outperformed its peers by 11% a year since inception – except that it’s also done it was lower volatility and a near-zero correlation to the market. We’ll leave it to you to sort out.

Funds in Registration

Whether it’s the time of year or the sense of an industry-wide death spiral, the number of new funds in registration has been steadily declining. This month saw either six or 20 filings, depending on how you could a weird series of options funds from a group called Vest Financial. Two funds start out:

Moerus Worldwide Value Fund marks the return of Amit Wadhwaney, who managed Third Avenue International Value (TAVIX) from 2001-2013. Morningstar described Mr. Wadhwaney as “skilled and thoughtful.” His fund was distinguished by somewhat better than average returns with “markedly lower” volatility and strong down-market performance.  The fund’s performance since his departure has been disastrous.

Sit ESG Growth Fund which targets financially sound firms with good ESG records. The success of the other funds in the Sit family suggests that values-driven investors might find it worth investigating.

Manager Changes

We’ve track down rather more than 70 manager changes this month plus, of course, the one MANAGER CHANGE! Which is to say, Mr. Goldfarb’s departure from Sequoia.

Updates

Congratulations to the good folks at Seafarer. Seafarer Overseas Growth & Income (SFGIX), topped $1.1 billion in assets in March, a singular achievement. In just over four years of operation, the fund has returned 24.8% while its average peer has lost 9.75%. Seafarer seems to have SEC clearance to launch their Seafarer Overseas Value fund, but has not yet done so.

Briefly Noted . . .

GlobalX and Janus are locked in a struggle to see who can release the greatest number of pointless ETFs in a month. The Global X entries are Health & Wellness Thematic ETF (BFIT), Longevity Thematic ETF (LNGR) and Millennials Thematic ETF (MILN). The latter focuses, like a laser, on those uniquely Millennial passions: “social and entertainment, clothing and apparel, travel and mobility, food/restaurants and consumer staples, financial services and investments, housing and home goods, education and employment, and health and fitness.” Janus weighed in with The Health and Fitness ETF, The Long Term Care ETF, The Obesity ETF and The Organics ETF. None have symbols but all will be available on May 31.

Upon further consideration of tax and other stuff, the Board of Trustees of Midas Series Trust has determined not to proceed with the merger of Midas Magic (MISEX) into the Midas Fund (MIDSX). This was an almost incalculably stupid plan from the get-go. MISEX is a diversified domestic equity fund whose top holdings include Berkshire-Hathaway, Google and Johnson & Johnson. Midas invests in gold miners. Over the last decade, Magic shares are up 74% while Midas lost 70%. And no, that’s not just because gold was down over the period; from 2006-2015, the spot price of gold rose from around $560 to about $1060. Here would be your investment options: Midas in blue, the average gold fund in, well, gold or Magic in yellow.

It’s easy to see why liquidating both funds makes sense. They’ve got $12-14 million in assets, weak to horrible long-term records and expenses pushing 4.0%. It’s hard to see how the Trustees managed to declare that “it’s in the best interest of the shareholders” to place them in Midas.

Effective March 31, 2016, the Templeton Foreign (TEMFX), Global Opportunities (TEGOZ) and World (TEMWX) funds gained the flexibility to “to hedge (protect) against currency risks using certain derivative instruments including currency and cross currency forwards and currency futures contracts.”

Tobin Smith, a financial tout for Fox News from 2000-2013, was nailed by the SEC for nearly $258,000 on charges that he fraudulently promoted a penny stock, IceWEB, to investors. Apparently the firm’s CEO wanted to pump its trading volume and price and, for a price, Mr. Smith and his firm was happy to oblige. The IceWEB scam occurred in 2012. He was terminated in 2013 over the on-air promotion of yet another stock.

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

As of April 11, 2016, AllianzGI Ultra Micro Cap Fund (GUCAX) will reopen.

Effective April 1, 2016, the Boston Trust Small Cap Fund (BOSOX) and the Walden Small Cap Innovations Fund (WASOX) will no longer be closed to new investors.

The Gotham Index Plus Fund (GINDX) is reducing their administrative fee by 2 basis points, from 1.17% to 1.15%. Woo hoo! Including the “acquired fund fees and expenses,” the fund continues to cost institutional investors 3.28% per year. The reduction came on the $15 million fund’s first anniversary. The fund posted returns in the top 2% of its large-core peer group.

Invesco International Growth Fund (AIIEX) reopened to all investors on March 18, 2016. Class B shares are closed and will not re-open.

J.P. Morgan U.S. Large Cap Core Plus Fund (JLCAX) has reopened to new investors

Effective April 1, 2016, Kaizen Advisory, LLC (the “Advisor”) has lowered its annual advisory fee on Kaizen Hedged Premium Spreads Fund (KZSAX) from 1.45% to 1.10% and agreed to reduce the limit on total annual fund operating expenses by 0.35% to 1.75% for “A” shares.

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Effective April 30, 2016, the Diamond Hill Small-Mid Cap Fund (DHSCX) will close to most new investors. 

On the general topic of “related inconveniences,” several fund advisors have decided that they need more of your money. The shareholders of LoCorr Managed Futures Strategy Fund (LFMAX) agreed, and voted to raise their fees management fees to 1.85%. To be clear: that’s not the fund’s expense ratio, that’s just the part of the fee that goes to pay the managers for their services. Similarly, shareholders at Monte Chesapeake Macro Strategies Fund (MHBAX) have voted to bump their managers’ comp to 1.70% of assets. In each case, the explanation is that the advisor needs the more to hire more sub-advisers.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

On May 2, American Century Strategic Inflation Opportunities Fund (ADSIX) will be renamed the Multi-Asset Real Return Fund. The plan is to invest primarily in TIPs with “a portion” in commodities-related securities and REITs.

As of April 1, 2016, Cavanal Hill Balanced Fund became Cavanal Hill Active Core Fund (APBAX). The big accompanying change: The percentage of equity securities that the Fund normally invest in shall change from “between 40% and 75%” to “between 40% and 75%.” If you’re thinking to yourself, “but Dave, those are identical ranges,” I concur.

Effective April 18, 2016, Columbia Small Cap Core (LSMAX) will change its name to Columbia Disciplined Small Core Fund.

Liquidation of JPMorgan Asia Pacific Fund (JAPFX). The Board of Trustees of the JPMorgan Asia Pacific Fund has approved the liquidation and dissolution of the fund on or about April 29, 2016. 

Matthews Asia Science and Technology (MATFX) has been rechristened as Matthews Asia Innovators Fund. They formerly were constrained to invest at least 80% of their assets in firms that “derive more than 50% of their revenues from the sale of products or services in science- and technology-related industries and services.” That threshold now drops to 25%.

Pear Tree PanAgora Dynamic Emerging Markets Fund has been renamed Pear Tree PanAgora Emerging Markets Fund (QFFOX). At the same time, expenses have been bumped up from 1.37% (per Morningstar) to 1.66% (in the amendment on file). Why, you ask? The old version of the fund “allocate[d] its assets between two proprietary strategies: an alpha modeling strategy and a risk-parity strategy.” The new version relies on “two proprietary risk-parity sub-strategies: an alternative beta risk-parity sub-strategy and a “smart beta” risk-parity sub-strategy.” So there’s your answer: beta costs more than alpha.

The PENN Capital High Yield Fund has changed its name to the PENN Capital Opportunistic High Yield Fund (PHYNX).

The managers of the Rainier High Yield Fund (RIMYX), Matthew Kennedy and James Hentges, have announced their intention to resign from Rainier Investment Management and join Angel Oak Capital Advisors. Subject to shareholder approval (baaaaaa!), the fund will follow them and become Angel Oak High Yield. Shareholders are slated to vote in mid-April.

Effective on or about May 1, 2016, the name of each Fund set forth below will be changed to correspond with the following table:

Current Fund Name	Fund Name Effective May 1, 2016
Salient Risk Parity Fund	Salient Adaptive Growth Fund
Salient MLP & Energy Infrastructure Fund II	Salient MLP & Energy Infrastructure Fund
Salient Broadmark Tactical Plus Fund	Salient Tactical Plus Fund

The Board of Trustees of Franklin Templeton Global Trust recently approved a proposal to reposition the Templeton Hard Currency Fund (ICPHX) as a global currency fund named Templeton Global Currency Fund. That will involve changing the investment goal of the fund and modifying the fund’s principal investment strategies.

Seeing not advantage in value, Voya is making the fourth name change in two years to one of its funds. Effective May 1, we’ll be introduced to Voya Global Equity Fund (NAWGX) which has been Voya Global Value Advantage since May 23, 2014. For three weeks it has been called Voya International Value Equity (May 1 – 23, 2014). Prior to that, it was just International Value Equity. The prospectus will remove “value investing” as a risk factor.

Thirty days later, Voya Mid Cap Value Advantage Fund (AIMAX) becomes Voya Mid Cap Research Enhanced Index Fund. The expense ratio does not change as it moves from “active” to “enhanced index,” though both the strategy and management do.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Breithorn Long/Short Fund (BRHAX) has closed and will liquidate on April 8, 2016.

Crow Point Defined Risk Global Equity Income Fund (CGHAX) has closed and will liquidate on April 25, 2016.

The Board of Trustees of Dreyfus Opportunity Funds has approved the liquidation of Dreyfus Strategic Beta U.S. Equity Fund (DOUAX), effective on or about April 15, 2016

DoubleLine just liquidated the last of three equity funds launched in 2013: DoubleLine Equities Growth Fund (DDEGX), which put most of its puddle of assets in high-growth mid- and large cap stocks. Based on its performance chart, you could summarize its history as: “things went from bad to worse.”

Dunham Alternative Income Fund (DAALX) will be exterminated (!) on April 25, 2016. (See, ‘cause the ticker reads like “Daleks” and the Daleks’ catchphrase was not “Liquidate!”)

On August 26, 2016, Franklin Flex Cap Growth Fund (FKCGX) will be devoured. Franklin Growth Opportunities Fund (FGRAX) will burp, but look appropriately mournful for its vanished sibling.

Frost Natural Resources Fund (FNATX) liquidated on March 31, 2016. Old story: seemed like a good idea when oil was $140/barrel, not so much at $40. In consequence, the fund declined 36% from inception to close.

Hodges Equity Income Fund (HDPEX) merged into the Hodges Blue Chip Equity Income Fund (HDPBX) on March 31, 2016. At $13 million each, neither is economically viable, really. $26 million will be tough but the fund’s record is okay, so we’ll be hopeful for them.

The Board of Trustees of LKCM Funds, upon the recommendation of Luther King Capital Management Corporation, the investment adviser to each fund, has approved a Plan of Reorganization and Dissolution pursuant to which the LKCM Aquinas Small Cap Fund (AQBLX) and the LKCM Aquinas Growth Fund (AQEGX), would be reorganized into the LKCM Aquinas Value Fund (AQEIX).

The Board of Trustees of the MassMutual Premier Funds has approved a Plan of Liquidation and Termination pursuant to which it is expected that the MassMutual Barings Dynamic Allocation Fund (MLBAX) will be dissolved. Effective on or about June 29, 2016 (the “Termination Date”), shareholders of the various classes of shares of the fund will receive proceeds in proportion to the number of shares of such class held by each of them on the Termination Date.

Oberweis Asia Opportunities Fund (OBAOX), a series of The Oberweis Funds (the “Trust”), scheduled for April 22, 2016, you will be asked to vote upon an important change affecting your fund. The purpose of the special meeting is to allow you to vote on a reorganization of your fund into Oberweis China Opportunities Fund (OBCHX).

On March 21, the Board of RX Traditional Allocation Fund (FMSQX) decided to close and liquidate it. Ten days later it was gone.

Satuit Capital U.S. Small Cap Fund (SATSX) will be liquidating its portfolio, winding up its affairs, and will distribute its assets to fund shareholders as soon as is practicable, but in no event later than April 15, 2016.

SignalPoint Global Alpha Fund (SPGAX) will liquidate on April 29, 2016.

Toroso Newfound Tactical Allocation Fund was liquidated on March 30, 2016.

On March 17, 2016, the Virtus Board of Trustees voted to liquidate the Virtus Alternative Income Solution (VAIAX), Virtus Alternative Inflation Solution (VSAIX), and Virtus Alternative Total Solution (VATAX) funds. They’ll liquidate around April 29, 2016.

In Closing . . .

May’s a big month for us as we celebrate our fifth anniversary. When we launched, Chip reported that the average life expectancy for a site like ours is … oh, six weeks. Even I’m a bit stunned as we begin a sixth year.

It goes without saying that you make it possible but, heck, I thought I’d say it anyway. Thanks and thanks and thanks again to you all!

Each month about 24,000 people read the Observer but about 6,000 of them are reading it for the first time. For their benefit, I need to repeat the explanation for the “hey, if you’re not charging and there aren’t any ads, how do you stay in business?” question.

Here’s the answer: good question! There are two parts to the answer. First, the Observer reflects the passions of a bunch of folks who are working on your behalf because they want to help, not because they’re looking for money.  And so all of us work for somewhere between nothing (Brian, Charles, Ed, Sam, Leigh – bless you all!) and next-to-nothing (Chip and me). That’s not sustainable in the long term but, for now, it’s what we got and it works. So, part one: low overhead.

Second, we’re voluntarily supported by our readers. Some folks make tax-deductible contributions now and then (Thanks, Gary, Edward, and Mr. West!), some contribute monthly through an automatic PayPal setup (waves to Deb and Greg!) and many more use of Amazon link. The Amazon story is simple: Amazon rebates to us and amount equal to about 7% of the value of any purchase you make using our Amazon Associates link. It’s invisible, seamless and costs you nothing. The easiest way is set it and forget it: bookmark our Amazon link or copy it and paste it into your web browser of choice as a homepage. After that, it’s all automatic. A few hundred readers used our link in March; if we could get everybody who reads us to use the system, it would make a dramatic difference.

In May we’re also hoping to provide new profiles of two old friends: Aston River Road Independent Value and Matthews Asian Growth & Income. And, with luck, we’ll have a couple other happy birthday surprises to share.

Until then, keep an eye out in case you spot a huge dome wandering by. If so, let me know since we seem to be missing one!

By David Snowball

Dear friends,

It’s spring! Sort of. Despite the steady, light snow falling outside my window, March 1 is the beginning of “meteorological spring” and I’m indisputably in the middle of Augustana’s Spring Break. (It always looked better on MTV.) Spring training, both for major leaguers and my son’s high school team, has begun. There are stirrings in my garden and a couple newly-arrived catalogs (yes, I still get real mail) are encouraging horticultural fantasies: a swath of pollinator-friendly native plants taking over the southwest corner of the yard, a new home for my towering wall of sunflowers, some experiments with carrots, replacing more of the lawn with a rain garden to reduce run-off, regrowing a full head of hair … anything’s imaginable and everything’s possible, at least until I have to figure out how to pull it off.

Sadly, as Rudyard Kipling observed, “gardens are not made by sitting in the shade.”

For one more month, at least, I focus on tidying up my financial garden. We start this month’s issue with three of the most important kind of story: ones that actually affect me.

Artisan pulls the plug

Artisan has announced the liquidation of Artisan Small Cap Value (ARTVX), my oldest holding. My first fund, purchased when I was young and dumb, was AIM Constellation, then a very good mid-cap growth fund that carried a 5.5% load. After a bit, I learned that paying sales loads without any compensating benefit was stupid, so I stopped. I sold my shares and, shortly before it closed, invested the proceeds in Artisan Small Cap (ARTSX). Shortly after Artisan launched Small Cap Value in 1997, I moved my investment over from Small Cap. The $367 million fund, down from a peak of $3 billion in 2011, will be merged into Artisan Mid Cap Value (ARTQX) in May, 2016.

After a couple withdrawals and almost 19 years of paying taxes on the account, I’m disconcerted to report that I’ll be able to report a 30% tax loss on my 2016 taxes.

What happened? The managers’ discipline (and the dictates of marketing to advisors who want to execute their own asset allocation plans) does not encompass holding significant cash. And so, despite the fact that “We’ve complained for a long time now that too much of the market is fully- or fairly valued,” they stayed fully-invested. Their discipline also pushed them toward overweighting the best-valued stocks they could find and those turned out to be in two of the market’s worst areas: energy and industrials, that latter of which “have backdoor exposure to energy.” They eventually overweighted those areas by more than 2:1. That’s, at best, a very partial explanation for the fact that the fund trailed 90% or more of its small-value peers in five of the past six years, including years with high oil prices.

The folks at Artisan position this as a simple economic decision: “a determination was made that the strategy/fund was no longer commercially viable… Given our past few years of underperformance, we have seen outflows (and passive has been an asset flow winner here). We are also hearing that fewer folks plan to use dedicated small-cap value allocations going forward.” The management team “drove the decision” and they “still believe in the asset class.”

This is the first fund liquidation in Artisan’s history.

The team manages two other funds, Mid Cap Value (ARTQX) and the large-cap oriented Value (ARTLX). Over the full market cycle, ARTQX modestly leads its peer group in performance (40 bps/year) with subdued volatility. ARTLX trails its Lipper peers (80 bps/year) with somewhat higher volatility.

Bottom line

I prefer to maintain exposure to small value stocks, so I won’t wait around for the impending transition to the team’s mid-cap value fund. I’ll book my tax loss and move on.

The finalists for this slot in my portfolio are two cash-rich, low-vol funds: John Deysher’s Pinnacle Value Fund (PVFIX) and the team-managed Intrepid Endurance Fund (ICMAX, formerly Intrepid Small Cap). Both are run by absolute value investors. They have similar expense ratios, though Intrepid is five times Pinnacle’s size. Intrepid’s about two-thirds cash right now, Pinnacle about 50%. They are, by far, the two least volatile small cap funds around. Pinnacle’s market cap and turnover are both far lower.

We profiled Pinnacle one year ago. I think we’ll try to prepare a profile of Intrepid for our April issue and see if that helps decide things.

The tough question remaining

How long should you wait before you write off a manager or a fund? My normal rule is pretty straightforward: if I haven’t changed and they haven’t changed, then we’re not going to change. That is, if my portfolio needs remain the same, the management team remains intact and true to their discipline, then I’m not going to second-guess my due diligence. This may be the first time I’ve sold a fund in a decade. Leigh Walzer’s research on stumbling funds suggests that I should have sold in mid-2014 which would have spared me about a 10% loss assuming that I’d put it in a merely average SCV fund.

Romick stares reality in the face, and turns away

My single largest non-retirement holding is FPA Crescent (FPACX), which has always struck me as the quintessence of active management. While other managers were constrained to invest in a single asset class or in a single country, or to remain fully invested or unhedged, manager Steve Romick declared himself to be “the free-range chicken” of the investing world. He’d look for firms that offered compelling advantages, would analyze their capital structure and then invest in whatever instrument – common stock, warrants, senior debt – offered the most compelling opportunities. If nothing was compelling, he sat on cash.

That strategy performed wonderfully for years. Over the past decade the fund has led its Morningstar peer group by 1.12% annually though, by freakish coincidence, Morningstar also calculates that you lost 1.12% annually to taxes over the same period. Over the past three years, the fund has either been about average (using Morningstar’s “moderate allocation” peer group) or well-above average (using Lipper’s “flexible portfolio” one). In 2015, the fund lost money and finished in the bottom third of its Morningstar peer group.

Those two things do not bother me. Two others do. First, the fund has ballooned in size with no apparent effort at gatekeeping. In 2005, it performed gloriously but had under $1 billion in assets. In 2010, it performed solidly with $2.7 billion. It hit $10 billion in 2013 and $20 billion in 2015 and remains open today. While some funds have doubtless thrived in the face of huge, continual inflows, those are rare.

Second, Romick blinked. His recently released Annual Report offered the following announcement on page two:

At first glance, it appears that we’ve declined as much as the market — down 11.71% since May 2015’s market peak against the S&P 500’s 11.30% decline — but that’s looking at the market only through the lens of the S&P 500. However, roughly half of our equity holdings (totaling almost a third of the Fund’s equity exposure) are not included in the S&P 500 index. Our quest for value has increasingly taken us overseas and our portfolio is more global than it has been in the past. We therefore consider the MSCI ACWI a pertinent alternative benchmark.

What?

“We look pretty good compared to a global all-equity benchmark”?

Uhhh … the fund is 37% cash. Morningstar reports a net exposure (11% long minus 3% short) of only 8.5% to international stocks. The most recent report on FPA’s website suggests 16% but doesn’t separate long/short. If Morningstar is right, net exposure is way less global than either its Morningstar benchmark or Morningstar peer group.

Underperformance doesn’t bother me. Obfuscation does. The irony is that it bothers Mr. Romick as well, at least when it’s being practiced by others. In a 2012 letter criticizing the Fed, he explained what we ought to demand of our leaders and ourselves:

Blind faith has gotten us into trouble repeatedly throughout history. Just consider the rogue’s gallery of false idols, dictators, and charlatans we have followed, hoping for something different, something better. That misplaced conviction corrupts and destroys. Daily life does require we put our trust in others, but we should do so judiciously.

Nobody has all the answers. Genius fails. Experts goof. Rather than blind faith, we need our leaders to admit failure, learn from it, recalibrate, and move forward with something better… As the author Malcolm Gladwell so eloquently said, “Incompetence is the disease of idiots. Overconfidence is the mistake of experts…. Incompetence irritates me. Overconfidence terrifies me.”

FPA once ran funds in a couple of different styles, Mr. Romick’s and the other one. They’ve now purged themselves of their quality-growth team and have renamed and repurposed those funds. In repurposing Paramount, they raised the expense ratio, ostensibly to create parity with the Perennial fund. In a private exchange I asked why they didn’t simply lower Perennial’s e.r. rather than raising it and was assured that they really needed the extra cash for as-yet undisclosed enhancements.

I’ve lost faith.

Bottom line

I’m not sure whether FPA is now being driven by investment discipline, demands for ideological purity or a rising interest in gathering assets. Regardless, I’m going. I have long respected the folks at the Leuthold Group and we recently profiled their flagship Leuthold Core Investment Fund (LCORX). Leuthold has delivered on such promises more consistently, with more discipline, for a longer period than virtually any competitor.” They’re apt to be the home for the proceeds from an FPA sale plus closing two small accounts.

Morningstar doesn’t share my reservations and FPACX retains a “Gold” analyst rating from the firm.

The tough question remaining

How do we account for cultural change in assessing a firm? Firms never admit to their internal machinations, the story is always “a long heritage and a strict discipline, honored, preserved, extended!” They say it because they must and, often, because they believe it. From the outside, it’s about impossible to test those claims and people get downright offended when you even broach the subject. Some folks have managed beautifully; Mairs and Power come to mind. Some have been disasters, Third Avenue most recently. And others, such as Royce Funds, are just now trying to navigate it. Without access to contacts within the organization or with their peers, we only see shadows and flickers, “as through a glass, darkly.”

Hate it when that happens.

Andrew Foster, Sufi master

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.
― Rumi, Masnavi I Ma’navi,ca. 1270

I like Andrew Foster, manager of Seafarer Overseas Growth & Income (SFGIX). I also respect him. The confluence of those two is rare.

In his essay “Self Reliance,” Emerson describes “foolish consistency” as “the hobgoblin of little minds.” The rough translation is the people don’t like to admit that they’re unsure, whether it’s about what to think or what to do, even to themselves. And so they come up with procedures, policies, explanations, Great Insights and Magic Rules and claim you can stop thinking worrying now. You’ll notice this in the classroom: young teachers are terrified at losing control or losing respect while really experienced ones are comfortable admitting that they simply don’t have nearly as many answers as they’ve got questions, suspicions or possibilities.

That came to mind in reading two of Mr. Foster’s recent pieces, his Fourth Quarter 2015 Portfolio Review and his Semi-Annual Report. Between the two, you get a sense of a guy who is really sharp but not under the illusion of his own omniscience.

The short version of investing in the emerging markets over the last couple years: things have been wildly volatile and mostly negative, China’s been a concern, Seafarer’s doing better than the great majority of its peers.

Most managers, whether they’re small minded or they think you are, would have said that in about three paragraph – emphasizing their own excellence in the latter – and hit “send.”

Mr. Foster approached things differently. His analysis was more nuanced, sharper, more self-effacing and more respectful of his readers’ intelligence than almost any of what I’ve read in the professional press. You should read it, but only if you have the time to think about what you’ve read because you’ll encounter more careful speculation than illusory certainty.

Why was the market rising at the start of the fourth quarter?

Between October 1 and November 4, the benchmark index rose 9.72%. There was no obvious reason for this gain.

Okay, so what explains Seafarer’s outperformance?

The Fund’s marginal outperformance was due to selected holdings in China, Japan, Indonesia and Turkey. Those holdings had no unifying theme or idea that could explain the basis for their performance during the quarter.

Perhaps it’s because you were defensively positioned on China?

Unfortunately, my notion of “defensive” valuations proved faulty.

Oh. Dja do any better on currencies?

My prediction [there] was terribly wrong.

Ah, I see. You’ve described Seafarer as a China-centric portfolio. What’s going on there?

I wish I knew with certainty. Unfortunately, the situation is sufficiently opaque that facts are scant, and thus I can only speculate as to the cause behind the A-share market’s sudden collapse.

Well, how about a guess then? Surely you’ll do better than the bobbleheads in the media.

Unfortunately, I can only speculate as to the actual cause of the decline, so my thoughts on the matter are frankly no better than the media’s. I have very few facts to substantiate my arguments; all I can do is look at the pattern of events that has unfolded, and speculate as to the causes. 

I’m getting desperate here, Andrew. Why not just fling a wild speculation or two at us?

I would suggest two possible scenarios that might have caused the sell-off:

1. The Renminbi’s weakness is not the direct cause of the decline, but it is a precursor for a growing liquidity shortage within the Chinese financial system. The currency’s persistent weakness may indicate that one or more banks, or perhaps some portion of the “shadow banking system,” may soon experience a liquidity crisis. This explanation would suggest the currency is signaling stressed liquidity within the financial system, to which stocks have reacted swiftly and punitively.
2. The current government is unstable. Over the past three years, the government has propagated a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that has sometimes terminated in controversial political purges. The government has also introduced bold economic reforms – reforms that I largely support – but that have undoubtedly alienated powerful vested interests. Meanwhile, the current president has sought to consolidate power in a manner not seen since Mao’s era. It might be that such dramatic actions have silently eroded support for the current government among powerful factions within the Communist party. If so, the weakness in the currency and the stock market might portend a deeper source of instability.

Either scenario might have been the root cause of the volatility we observed; it is also possible that both acted in tandem.

You get the idea, I think: rather more insight than ego, important arguments made in a clear and accessible style.

In terms of portfolio positioning, he’s finding better values in Latin America and Emerging Europe than in Asia, so the portfolio is the least Asia-centered in its history. Similarly, there are intriguing opportunities in larger firms than in smaller ones right now; he’s actually been surprised at his portfolio’s small- to mid-cap positioning, but that’s where the value has been.

Bottom line

Seafarer remains a core position in my non-retirement portfolio and I’ve been adding to it steadily. Valuations in the emerging markets are compelling, with stocks trading at P/E ratios of 5 or 6. I’m tempted to sell my holdings in Matthews Asia Growth & Income (MACSX) and roll them into Seafarer, mostly as an attempt to simplify, but the two really do seem to be driven by diverse forces.

For now, I’ll continue to invest in each and, mostly, ignore the noise.

The tough question remaining

If emerging markets are simultaneously our best and our worst investment option, what on earth do we do with them? There’s a near-universal agreement that they represent the cheapest stocks and most dynamic economies in the world. And yet, collectively, over the last decade EM equity funds have made 1.3% annually with a standard deviation of 23. Run away? Pretend that investing in Nestle is the same just because they sell a lot in emerging markets? Hedge, which is tough? Hybrid? Hope? The worst case is “hire Greed and Panic to manage your investments,” though that seems awfully popular.

The Weather

By Edward Studzinski

“When we unleash the dogs of war, we must go where they take us.”

Dowager Countess of Grantham

Starting off one of these monthly discussions with a title about the weather should be indicative that this piece will perhaps be more disjointed than usual, but that is how the world and markets look to me at present. And there is very little in the way of rational explanation for why the things that are happening are happening. My friend Larry Jeddeloh, of The Institutional Strategist, would argue that this country has been on a credit cycle rather than a business cycle for more than fifteen years now. Growth in the economy is tied to the price and availability of credit. But the cost of high yield debt is rising as spreads blow out, so having lots of cheap credit available is not doing much to grow the economy. Put another way, those who need to be able to borrow to either sustain or grow their business, can’t. A friend in the investment banking business told me yesterday about a charter school that has been trying to refinance a debt package for several years now, and has not been able to (thank you, Dodd-Frank). So once again we find ourselves in a situation where those who don’t need the money can easily borrow, and those who need it, are having difficulty obtaining it. We see this in another area, where consumers, rather than spend and take on more debt, have pulled back.

Why? We truly are in a moment of deflation on the one hand (think fuel and energy costs) and the hints of inflation on the other (think food, property taxes, and prescription drug costs on the other). And the debt overload, especially public debt, has reached a point where something has to be done other than kicking the can down the road, or other major crisis. I would argue we are on the cusp of that crisis now, where illiquidity and an inability to refinance, is increasingly a problem in the capital markets. And we see that, where the business models of businesses such as energy-related master limited partnerships, premised on always being able to refinance or raise more equity, face issues.

I was reading through some old articles recently, and came across the transcript in Hermes, the Columbia Business School publication, of a seminar held in May 1985 there. The speakers were Warren Buffett, James Rogers, Jr., and Donald Kurtz. As is often the case, sifting through the older Buffett can be rewarding albeit frustrating when you realize he saw something way before its time. One of the things Buffett said then was that, based on his observations of our political system, “ … there is a small but not insignificant probability that we will lose fiscal control at some point.” His point was that given a choice, politicians will always opt for an implicit tax rather than an explicit tax. If expenditures should determine the level of explicit taxes, than taxes should cover expenditures. Instead, we have built in implicit taxation, expecting inflation to cover things without the citizens realizing it (just as you are not supposed to notice how much smaller the contents are with the packaging changes in food products – dramatically increasing your food budget).

The easier way to think of this is that politicians will always do what allows them to keep doing what they like, which is to stay in office. Hence, the bias ends up being to debase the currency through the printing presses. So you say, what’s the problem? We have more deflation than inflation at this point?

And the problem is, if you look at history, especially Weimar Germany, you see that you had bouts of severe inflation and sharp deflationary periods – things did not move in a straight line.

Now we have had many years of a bull market in stocks and other assets, which was supposed to create wealth, which would than drive increases in consumption. The wealth aspect happened, especially for the top 5%, but the consumption did not necessarily follow, especially for those lower on the economic ladder. So now we see stock and asset prices not rising, and the unspoken fear is – is recession coming?

My take on it, is that we have been in a huge jobless recovery for most of the country, that the energy patch and those industries related to it (and the banks that lent money) are now beyond entering recession, and that those effects will continue to ripple through the rest of the economy. Already we see that, with earnings estimates for the S&P 500 continuing to drift lower. So for most of you, again, my suggestion is to pay attention to what your investment time horizons and risk tolerances are.

Moving totally down a different path, I would like to suggest that an article in the February 28, 2016 New York Sunday Times Magazine entitled “Stocks & Bots” is well worth a read. The focus of the article is about the extent to which automation will eliminate jobs in the financial services industry going forward. We are not talking about clerks and order entry positions. That revolution has already taken place, with computerized trading over the last twenty years cutting by way of example, the number of employees buying and selling stock over the phone from 600 to 4 at one of the major investment banking firms. No, we are talking about the next level of change, where the analysts start getting replaced by search programs and algorithms. And it then moves on from there to the people who provide financial advice. Will the Millennials seek financial advice from programs rather than stock brokers? Will the demand grow exponentially for cheaper investment products?

I think the answer to these questions is yes, the Millennials will do things very differently in terms of utilizing financial services, and the profit margins of many of today’s investment products, such as mutual funds, will be driven much lower in the not too distant future. Anecdotally, when one has a year in the markets like 2015 and the beginning of 2016, many investment firms would push down the bonus levels and payments from the highest paid to take care of the lower ranks of employees. I was not surprised however to hear that one of the largest asset managers in the world, based in Boston, had its senior employees elect to keep the bonuses high at the “partner” levels and not take care of the next levels down this past year. They could see the handwriting on the wall.

All of which brings me back to the weather. Probably suggesting that one should read a politically incorrect writer like Mark Twain is anathema to many today, but I do so love his speech on the New England weather. For a preview for those so inclined, “The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing that, when it strikes a thing it doesn’t leave enough of that thing behind for you tell whether – Well, you’d think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.”

At a future point I will come back for a discussion of Mr. Twain’s essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying” which might be essential reading as this year’s elections take shape.

High Dividends, Low Volatility

From the Trapezoid Mailbag:

A financial advisor in Florida is interested in low-volatility products. With the market so choppy, he would like to dial down risk in his client’s portfolio. He wondered whether SEI Institutional Managed Trust Tax-Managed Volatility Fund (TMMAX) was a suitable choice.

As Exhibit I illustrates low-volatility has been a successful investment strategy in recent years. A good argument can be made that historically, low-volatility stocks were mispriced. Players like Berkshire Hathaway and private equity capitalized on this by levering up these firms to deliver strong risk-adjusted returns. There is a heavy overlap between the low-volatility universe and the high-dividend universe. Many high-dividend stocks have dropped assets into REITs in recent years which have fueled better returns for this sector. Low volatility has outperformed the broad market meaningfully for the past two quarters, partly due its lower beta.

Trapezoid doesn’t take a view on whether these trends will continue or whether low-volatility is the best place to hide out in a tough market. In this instance, we wonder whether the “private equity bid” which contributed to the sector’s strong performance will be as reliable as corporate credit markets tighten and whether the increasing use of REIT/MLP structures has about run its course. What Trapezoid does do is help investors, advisors, and allocators find the best instruments to express their investment strategy based on extrapolation of historic skill in relation to risk.

There are several passive strategies which express the same theme. For example, Power Shares markets an S&P 500 Low Volatility Portfolio (SPLV) and an S&P 500 High Dividend Low Volatility Portfolio (SPHD). Those two funds move virtually in lockstep, underscoring the overlap between high dividend and low volatility. The correlation between the PowerShares indices and TMMAX is 98.5% and the expense ratio is 70-75 basis points lower.

Despite the availability of good passive indices, we would nonetheless consider TMMAX. The fund’s track record has been slightly above average, making us slightly confident (53%) it is worth the added cost. SEI also manages the SEI US Managed Volatility Fund which has a 50% confidence rating (slightly lower due mainly to higher expense ratio.)

SEI relies on three subadvisors to manage the fund. The largest sleeve is managed by Analytic Investors (39%) followed by LSV (35%) and AJO. While we don’t have sleeve-level data, we can evaluate the body of work by Analytic and LSV looking at comparable sole-managed funds. Analytic’s track record the past five years on Touchstone Dynamic Equity Fund (TDELX) is good but the previous five years were poor. LSV’s record at LSV Conservative Value Equity Fund (LSVVX) and Harbor Mid-Cap Value Fund (HIMVX) was middling.

We have discussed in the past that Morningstar star ratings have some predictive value but that even a five-star rating is not sufficient to make an investment decision. The SEI funds are good examples. TMMAX, SEVIX, and SXMAX all carry five star ratings, and we agree investors are better off choosing these funds than many of the alternatives but the evidence of manager skill is inconclusive.

If the advisor is willing to expand his horizons a little, he can find similar funds which improve the odds a little. We used the Orthogonal Attribution Engine to find highly correlated funds with better confidence ratings and came up with the following.

A few observations

• T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation Fund (PRWCX) is closed to new investors
• The two Vanguard funds attempt to outperform their benchmark indices using a quantitative strategy.
• Many of the other similar funds have higher betas, which may be a deal breaker for our advisor who wants to reduce his client’s market exposure
• Many of these funds are large blend funds, accessible to demo customers at the www.fundattribution.com website.
• Our confidence ratings are based on data through 10/30/15. In the subsequent months TMMAX’s performance lagged the lower-cost PowerShares indices. This may serve to erode our confidence that active management pays for itself. Updated data will be posted shortly

The heightened appeal of low-volatility funds might suggest something else: Advisors are more focused on extreme negative outcomes which could get them fired than extreme positive outcomes. In a choppy market, low-volatility funds have the allure of a safe haven. We don’t have a view on the wisdom of this. But we are interested in helping allocators avoid individual managers who have the potential to “blow up.” One of Trapezoid’s forthcoming new metrics hones in on this risk by focusing on the likelihood of extreme negative outcomes.

Offered without comment: Your American Funds share class options

MFO Rating Metrics

When MFO introduced its rating system in June of 2013, it chose Martin Ratio as the principal performance rating metric. Martin is a risk adjusted return metric that is the ratio between excess return, which is the compounded annualized total return above risk free T-Bill return, divided by the so-called Ulcer Index, which is a measure of extent and duration of drawdown. Our friend Peter Matin formulated the Ulcer Index as described in An Alternative Approach to the Measurement of Investment Risk & Risk-Adjusted Performance.

For each fund category, like Large Growth or Moderate Allocation, the MFO Rating system divides funds into five groups or “quintiles” based on the risk adjusted return over selected evaluation periods. Funds with the highest Martin in each category are assigned a 5, while those with the lowest receive a 1.

While this approach suits many MFO readers just fine, especially having lived through two 50 percent equity market drawdowns in the past 15 years, others like Investor on the MFO Discussion Board, were less interested in risk adjusted return and wanted to see ratings based on absolute return. Others wanted to see ratings based on the more traditional risk adjusted Sharpe Ratio. (For more definitions, see A Look A Risk Adjusted Returns.)

It took a while, but subscribers on our MFO Premium site can now choose which rating metric they prefer, including multiple rating metrics simultaneously.

For example, since the start of the current market cycle in November 2007, which Small Cap funds have delivered the best absolute return (APR) and the best Martin Ratio and the best Sharpe Ratio? To find the answer, enter the selection criteria on the MFO MultiSearch tool, as depicted below (click image to enlarge), then hit the “Submit Search” button …

A total of 28 funds appear from the more than 9,000 unique funds in the MFO database. Here are the first 10, sorted by MFO Risk and then name:

Notables include Brown Capital Mgmt Small Company (BCSIX), Champlain Small (CIPSX), Conestoga Small Cap (CCASX), and FMI Common Stock (FMIMX). The closed BCSIX is both an MFO Great Owl and Fund Alarm Honor Roll fund. It is also a Morningstar Gold Medal fund, while Silver goes to CIPSX and CCASX.

Intrepid Endurance (ICMAX) has the lowest risk rating with a MFO Risk of 3, which means this fund has historically carried volatility suited for investors with Moderate risk tolerance. Unlike other metrics in the MFO ratings system, and in fact the risk metric in Morningstar’s rating system, which assign risk relative to other funds in category, the MFO Risk metric assigns its rating based on volatility relative to the overall market.

The MFO MultiSearch tool now enables searches using more than 55 screening criteria, organized by Basic Info, Period Metrics, Composite Period Metrics, MFO Designations, Portfolio Characteristics, and Purchase Info. A list of current criteria can be found here.

The Alt Perspective: Commentary and news from DailyAlts.

Pruning Season

You can call it a cycle, a season, or even a cleansing process, but when one looks at the liquid alternatives market, it’s apparent that there is some pruning going on. Some cleaning out of the products that no longer appeal to investors, those that hit a performance patch from which it would be near impossible to recover, or just didn’t gather the requisite assets for a fund to be viable. Clean out the funds that are not producing the intended results, or just aren’t resonating with investors.

This is all a healthy process as it makes room for newer products, the next generation. It also allows for a greater investment into existing products. Interestingly, we have already seen 9 alternative funds liquidated in the first two months of the year (and at least two more schedule to be liquidated) – some announced late last year, but nonetheless, fully liquidated in 2016. And these are from some bigger names in the industry, such as Lazard, Collins, Whitebox, Virtus, Ramius and Clinton. Some seasoned hedge fund managers in there, along with seasoned asset management firms.

Four of the liquidate funds were long/short equity funds, two were multi-alternative funds, and the remaining three included market neutral, event driven and non-traditional bonds. All in all, I think we will see more pruning in the coming months as fund managers rationalize their fund lineup as markets sell off, and begin thinking about the next set of products to introduce to the market.

The pruning process is healthy and helps future growth, so don’t be surprised to see more down the road. It’s just part of the natural cycle.

Asset Flows

January saw a continuation of 2015 where investors continued to pour money into multi-alternative funds and managed futures funds (inflows of $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively), while pulling assets from non-traditional bond funds, long/short equity and market neutral (-$3 billion, -$390 million and -$340 million, respectively). Excluding non-traditional bond funds and commodities, alternative mutual funds and ETFs gathered a total of $2.4 billion in January, bringing the total 12-month haul to $18.7 billion, third of any category behind international equity and municipal bonds and 11.5% of all net asset inflows.

Commodities bounced back in January with total inflows of $3.3 billion, led primarily by flows to precious metals funds, and gold funds in particular. Non-traditional bond funds, viewed as an alternative to long-only bond funds and a protective hedge against interest rate increases, have continued to disappoint in the aggregate. As a result, investors have pulled $17.9 billion of assets from these funds over the past 12 months.

Extended Reading

What did DailyAlts readers enjoy the most this past month? The three of the most widely read articles this past month were:

• Adding Liquid Alts to DC Plans and Target-Date Funds
• Distinction Between Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds Is Eroding
• Understanding Liquid Alternatives: Ask The Right Questions

While it appears to be pruning season, that doesn’t mean it is time to stop looking for alternative funds. With Spring approaching, now is a good time to take a look across your portfolio at the risks you have exposure to, and perhaps do a bit of pruning of your own to balance risks and hedge for what might be more volatility ahead.

Have a great March, and to keep up with daily or weekly news in the liquid alts market, be sure to sign up for our newsletter.

Observer Fund Profiles: LSOFX / RYSFX

Each month the Observer provides in-depth profiles of between two and four funds. Our “Most Intriguing New Funds” are funds launched within the past couple years that most frequently feature experienced managers leading innovative newer funds. “Stars in the Shadows” are older funds that have attracted far less attention than they deserve.

LS Opportunity Fund (LSOFX): this was a really solid long/short fund that had to press the “reset” button last May when their sub-advisor decided to pack it up and call it a career. In Prospector Partners, they may have found a team that executes the same stock-by-stock discipline even more excellently than their predecessors.

Royce Global Financial Services (RYFSX): when you think “financial services,” you likely think “monstrous big banks with tendrils everywhere and eight-figure bonuses.” Royce thinks differently, and their focus on smaller firms that dominate financial niches worldwide has made a remarkable difference for their investors.

Elevator Talk: Jim Robinson, Robinson Tax-Advantaged Income (ROBAX)

Since the number of funds we can cover in-depth is smaller than the number of funds worthy of in-depth coverage, we’ve decided to offer one or two managers each month the opportunity to make a 200 word pitch to you. That’s about the number of words a slightly-manic elevator companion could share in a minute and a half. In each case, I’ve promised to offer a quick capsule of the fund and a link back to the fund’s site. Other than that, they’ve got 200 words and precisely as much of your time and attention as you’re willing to share. These aren’t endorsements; they’re opportunities to learn more.

Jim Robinson formed Robinson Capital Management, located in Detroit’s ritzy Grosse Pointe suburb, in December, 2012. The firm manages about a quarter billion in assets for a handful of high net worth clients and advises two (soon to be three) mutual funds.

From 1987-1999, Mr. Robinson served as the Fixed Income CIO for the Munder Funds. During his stint, he grew fixed income AUM from $100 million to $20 billion. Eventually promoted to Chairman, CEO and President, he was responsible for about $38 billion in assets. He left Munder for Telemus Capital Partners, LLC, with whom his firm still has a relationship.

Robinson Capital uses a variety of strategies in their separate accounts. The Tax-Advantaged Income Fund pursues one strategy: it invests in closed-end muni bond funds. Closed-end funds (CEFs) are strange creatures, the forerunners of today’s actively-managed ETFs. They have managers and portfolios like open-end mutual funds do, but trade on exchanges like stocks and ETFs do. Such funds have several relevant characteristics:

1. They are far more likely to pursue income-oriented strategies than are open-end funds
2. They are far more likely to make extensive use of leverage and hold more illiquid securities than are open-end funds
3. Because they trade on exchanges, the managers never need to worry about meeting redemptions or closing the fund to new investors; they issue a set number of shares of the CEF during their initial public offering but after that they let buyers and sellers find each other.
4. Because they trade on exchanges, the market price of their shares changes minute-by-minute, and
5. Because they trade on exchanges, the net asset value of a share (the market value of all of the fund’s holdings divided by the number of shares outstanding) can diverge dramatically from that share’s market price (that is, the amount a potential seller can get at one particular moment for a share of the fund).

When shareholders panic, they may succumb to the temptation to sell shares of their fund for 15, 20 or even 40% less than they’re nominally worth, just because the seller really wants cash-in-hand. That’s mostly irrational. A handful of mutual fund firms – RiverNorth, Matisse, and Robinson among them – look to profit from panic. Using various metrics, they decide when to move in and buy shares that are selling at an unsustainable discount to their net asset values.

If everything goes according to plan, that strategy offers the potential for sustained, substantial, market-neutral gains: as soon as panic subsides, even if the market is still falling, a degree of rationality returns, investors start buying the discounted CEF shares, that bids up the price and the discount closes. If you invest before the crowd, you benefit when the shares you bought at, say, a 25% discount can now be sold at just a 5% discount.

Here’s a hypothetical illustration: the NAV of the Odd Income Fund is $100/share but, when rumors of dinosaurs rampaging down Wall Street rattles people, its market price drops to $75/share. Robinson moves in. In six months, the panic has passed, Odd Income’s NAV has risen a couple percent and its discount contracted to its non-panic norm of 5%. In such a scenario, Odd Income has earned 2% but folks who bought shares during the panic earned 29%.

There are distinct risks to playing this game, of course. The falling knife might continue to fall harder and faster than you’d imagined so that the 25% discount might widen to 35%. The manager of the underlying CEF might find that using leverage in a panicky market drives down the fund’s NAV as well as its market price. And, too, the CEF manager might simply do something stupid. It happens.

The folks who manage CEF-focused funds argue that downside risks are manageable through a combination of careful security selection, position-size limits and hedging. The upside can be dramatic. Here is the performance chart for ROBAX against two possible benchmarks: its Morningstar non-traditional bond peer group (orange) and long-term national muni bond group (yellow).

Here are Mr. Robinson’s 200 words on why investors concerned about income and income taxes should add ROBAX to their due-diligence list:

I generally tell people that the first three things you need to know about our fund are these:

• We pay out 40 basis points a month in tax-exempt income, on average
• We present very little credit risk; our portfolio’s credit quality is A/A+
• We hedge out interest rate risk, such that our effective duration is under a year.

There are 191 Tax-exempt closed-end funds. Today, 150 are trading at a discount to NAV. Some of those discounts are rational; if you have a poorly-managed fund buying difficult-to-price securities and misusing leverage, it should be trading at a discount. Heck, I analyze some of these funds and suspect the discount should be bigger than it is.

What we do is move money from rationally discounted funds to irrationally discounted ones. Six large fund companies – BlackRock, PIMCO, Nuveen and company – dominate the CEF space. That’s important because those companies have pretty good governance practices in place; BlackRock is aggressive about merging funds to harvest economies of scale, others do share buybacks and so on. When funds with good management, good governance and good portfolios sell at irrational discounts, we move. Bill Gross did me a big favor. Two days before we launched, he resigned from PIMCO. Gross had nothing to do with PIMCO’s CEFs but suddenly funds that always trade at a premium were available at a discount. We moved in, the discount predictably reversed, and we closed the position at a nice profit. That discount arbitrage adds about 200 bps to our performance.

The other thing we do that individual investors can’t, and that most advisors would find tough, time-consuming and expensive, is we largely hedge interest rate risk out of the portfolio. Tax-exempt CEFs tend to be long-dated and leveraged so they typically have 10-12 year weighted durations. In a year like 2013 when rates rise 1%, they lose 10-12% in principal value. Our hedge is not perfect, since Treasuries and munis don’t trade in perfect sync, but it’s pretty good.

Robinson Tax-Advantaged Income has a $2500 minimum initial investment for the “A” shares and $1,000,0000 for “I” shares. While there’s a sales load, load-waived shares are widely available. Direct expenses are capped at 1.60% on the “A” shares. Since the fund invests in other funds, you indirectly pay (through lower returns) a portion of those funds’ expenses. In 2014, that added 1.14% to ROBAX’s today expenses. The fund has about gathered about $74 million in assets since its September 2014 launch. Here’s the fund’s homepage.

Funds in Registration

Funds need to submit their prospectuses for SEC review before they’re permitted to offer the fund to the public. The SEC has 75 days in which to ponder the matter, which means that proposed new funds cool their heels for about two and a half months. During that time their prospectuses are available for review on the SEC’s website but fund advisors are forbidden to talk publicly about them. Each month Funds in Reg gives you a heads-up about what’s in the SEC pipeline.

Except for last month, when I stupidly forgot to include the file in our February issue. As a result, this month we cover the last two sets of no-load retail funds that will become available between March and May. We found 17 funds that qualify. Particularly interesting morsels include:

• 361 Domestic Long/Short Equity Fund, which will be managed by a really renowned investor – Harindra de Silva – who has a earned a great deal of respect in the industry and who already manages a number of top-ranked funds.
• Matthews Asia Credit Opportunities, which appears to be a high-yield, distressed securities version of the very fine Matthews Asia Strategic Income Fund.
• RiverPark Commercial Real Estate Fund, the latest entry in RiverPark’s quest to bring hedge fund strategies to “the mass affluent.” This fund has been running as a hedge fund for about five years now.

Sadly, there are a handful of future “Off to the Dustbin of History” nominees as well but I suppose that’s the magic of capitalism: 90% of the stuff we try fails, 9% does okay and 1% changes the world.

Uzès Grands Crus I

The French, being French, have their financial priorities in order. In February, Financière D’uzès announced the launch of their third mutual fund devoted to the investment potential of bottles of fine wine. At least 75% of the fund’s assets will be bottles of fine and their aim is “to outperform the annual rate for the five-year French treasury bond (OAT) with a minimum return of 5%.”

I reflected, very very briefly, on the investment value of the bottle of Lambrusco I bought at Trader Joe’s for $4.99, then made mid-winter sangria instead.

Manager Changes

The biggest news, by far, this month is the impending departure of Taymour R. Tamaddon from T. Rowe Price Health Sciences (PRHSX) and Donald Yacktman from his namesake funds. When Kris Jenner left the fund three years ago (how time flies!), the accepted wisdom was that nobody could live up to his legacy. Mr. Tamaddon then led the fund to 22.4% annualized returns, nearly 500 bps above his peers and good enough for a top 2% record.

Mr. Tamaddon steps down on July 1, 2016, is succeeded by Ziad Bakri then becomes manager of the $12 billion T. Rowe Price Institutional Large-Cap Growth Fund (TRLGX) on January 1, 2017.

Effective May 1, 2016, Donald A. Yacktman will transition to an advisory role and will no longer serve as a portfolio manager for AMG Yacktman (YACKX) and AMG Yacktman Focused (YAFFX) funds. The roughly corresponds with his 75^th birthday. Mr. Yacktman has been managing mutual funds since 1968, starting with Stein, Roe and the Selected American Shares before founding Yacktman Asset Management in 1992. $10,000 invested in YACKX that year would have grown to $95,000 today, which compares well to the returns on an investment in the S&P500 ($76,000) or the average large-value fund ($56,000). He was named Morningstar’s Manager of the Year in 1991 and was joined on the management team by his son, Stephen, in 2002. Stephen Yacktman and Jason Subotky will manage the funds after the transition.

Other than that, we found about 36 manager changes, a few years overdue.

Updates

Sequoia Fund (SEQUX) continues its defense of Valeant Pharmaceuticals in its Annual Report (2016) and they continued dodging the issue.

For the stock to regain credibility with long-term investors, Valeant will need to generate strong earnings and cash flow this year, make progress in paying down some of its debt, demonstrate that it can launch new drugs from its own development pipeline and avoid provoking health care payers and the government. The company has committed to doing all of these things and we are confident interim CEO Howard Schiller and interim board chairman Robert Ingram are focused on the right metrics. Before CEO J. Michael Pearson went out on an extended medical leave, he also seemed committed to this path.

“Avoid provoking health care payers.” Oh, right. That would be the predatory pricing model that attracted Sequoia to Valeant in the first place: Valeant would borrow money to buy a small pharmaceutical firm, then quintuple the price of the firm’s products. If that meant putting a few inexpensive lives at risk, well, that wasn’t Valeant’s problem.

Until it was. Before the blow-up, manager David Poppe’s tone was openly affectionate about “Mike,” Valeant’s president and almost giddy about the prospects. Valeant’s high-profile implosion cost Sequoia a lot:

As the largest shareholder of Valeant, our own credibility as investors has been damaged by this saga. We’ve seen higher-than-normal redemptions in the Fund, had two of our five independent directors resign in October and been sued by two Sequoia shareholders over our concentration in Valeant. We do not believe the lawsuit has merit and intend to defend ourselves vigorously in court. Moving along …

“Moving along”? No, it’s not time to move along, guys. Barron’s Chris Dieterich provides a nice synopsis of developments that transpired on February 29, the day Sequoia released their report:

Monday ushered in a nightmarish combination of trouble. First, Valeant said it would delay the release of its quarterly results. Then, news broke that Allergan (AGN) is challenging the patent to Xifaxan. Third, Moody’s Investors Service warned that it may need to downgrade portions of the company’s $31 billion of debt. Finally, headlines crossed the tape that Valeant faces a previously undisclosed investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

All told, the stock plunged 18% to $65.80 — a fresh three-year low (“Sequoia Fund Picked A Bad Time To Stick Up For Valeant”).

The bigger, unanswered question is what does this say about you as investors? Any damage to your credibility is (a) self-inflicted and (b) deserved. You committed one third of your fund and all of your credibility to an amoral little schemer who, on his best days, stayed right at the edge of what’s legal. That’s a fact you acknowledged. Then you implicitly compared him to Warren Buffett, an investor whose moral compass, operating style and record makes him utterly incomparable.

Investors might, heck, investors must, ask: where was your brain? Were you so blinded by the prospect of easy money that you chose to ignore the hard questions? The most optimistic interpretation is that you’re not addressing such questions because you’re being sued and you can’t afford to admit to whatever idiocy led to the resignations of 40% of your board last fall. The worrisome interpretation is that Sequoia isn’t Sequoia anymore; that the clarity of thought that guided it to renown in decades past mostly now serves to mask a less exalted management.

Think it can’t happen? Check Magellan, Fidelity (FMAGX), the other Titan which has now managed to trail its peers over the past five, ten, fifteen and twenty year periods. Utterly dominant in the market cycle from 1973-1987 when it beat its peers by 1000 basis points/year, the fund hasn’t even managed consistent mediocrity since.

Morningstar doesn’t share my reservations and SEQUX retains a “Gold” analyst rating from the firm. Their equity analyst also doesn’t share my concerns about Valeant, which they rate (on 3/1/16) as a five-star stock whose shares are selling at about one-third of their fair value. Senior equity analyst Michael Waterhouse doesn’t “anticipate any major shift in our long-term thinking for the company.”

Briefly Noted . . .

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

Chou has voluntarily decided to waive its entire advisory fee on the Chou Opportunity Fund (CHOEX) beginning on January 1, 2016. In addition, on February 18, 2016 Chou made a voluntary capital contribution to the Opportunity Fund in the amount of $918,468, which approximates the advisory fees retained by Chou with respect the Opportunity Fund last year. Why, you ask? The advisor describes it as “a gesture of goodwill … in recognition of the fund’s underperformance” in 2015. That’s an oblique reference to having lost 22% in 2015 and another 20% in the first two months of 2016.

The advisor to the Great Lakes Bond Fund has closed the fund’s Investor Class (GLBDX) and converted the former Investor accounts into Institutional Class (GLBNX) ones. They then lowered the minimum on the Institutional shares by 99%, from $100,000 to $1,000. Net, potential retail investors save 25 bps.

Hotchkis & Wiley Mid-Cap Value Fund (HWMAX) has reopened to new investors.

RS Partners Fund (RSPFX) reopened to new investors on March 1, 2016. None of the fund’s independent trustees have chosen to partner with you by investing in the fund. The managers’ investment in the fund ranges between “modest” and “none.”

Walthausen Small Cap Value Fund (WSCVX) reopened to new investors on March 1, 2016.

Wasatch Emerging Markets Small Cap Fund (WAEMX) has reopened to new investors. Thanks for the heads up, Openice!

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Nope, turns out “turning away money” wasn’t a popular move in February. We found no funds closing their doors.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

Armor Alternative Income Fund (AAIFX) has become Crow Point Alternative Income Fund. 

Diamond Hill Strategic Income Fund (DSIAX) has been renamed the Diamond Hill Corporate Credit Fund to better reflect what it’s up to.

Forward no more. On May 1, 2016, the name “Forward” disappears from the world of mutual funds. In general, all of the former Forward Funds will be renamed as Salient Funds, which no change other than substituting “Salient” for “Forward” in the name. There are a few exceptions,

Current Forward Name	New Salient Name
Commodity Long/Short Strategy	Commodity Long/Short Strategy
Credit Analysis Long/Short	Tactical Muni Strategy
Dynamic Income	US Dividend Signal
EM Corporate Debt	EM Corporate Debt
Emerging Markets	EM Dividend Signal
Frontier Strategy	Frontier Strategy
Global Infrastructure	EM Infrastructure
Growth Allocation	Adaptive Balanced
High Yield Bond	High Yield
Income Builder	Adaptive Income
International Dividend	International Dividend Signal
International Real Estate	International Real Estate
International Small Companies	International Small Cap
Investment Grade Fixed-Income	Investment Grade
Real Estate	Real Estate
Real Estate Long/Short	Tactical Real Estate
Select Income	Select Income
Select Opportunity	Select Opportunity
Tactical Growth	Tactical Growth
Total MarketPlus	Adaptive US Equity

TIAA-CREF has boldly rebranded itself as TIAA.

Straightforward. Yep. 74%. Unless you’re buying the retail share class in which case it’s nine of 33 funds excluding money markets, or 27%. 32.5% of all funds receive either four- or five-stars from Morningstar.

And about that “uncomplicated” thing? Count the number of clicks it takes you to get to any particular fund. It took me two cups of coffee before I finally got to the one I wanted.

As of May 9, 2016, Transparent Value becomes … well, insert your own snark here. In any case, the Transparent Value Funds become Guggenheim Funds.

Current Name	New Name
Trans Value Directional Allocation	Guggenheim Directional Allocation
Trans Value Dividend	Guggenheim RBP® Dividend
Trans Value Large-Cap Defensive	Guggenheim RBP® Large-Cap Defensive
Trans Value Large-Cap Market	Guggenheim RBP® Large-Cap Market
Trans Value Large-Cap Value	Guggenheim RBP® Large-Cap Value

On March 1, 2016, The Wall Street Fund (WALLX) became Evercore Equity Fund (EWMCX). The word “Equity” in the name also triggered a new promise in the prospectus that the fund, which already invests in equities, promises to invest in equities.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

On whole, fund companies would be well-advised to extract their heads from their behinds. If you’re not willing to stick with a new fund for, say, a whole market cycle, then don’t launch the damned thing. The hypocrisy of declaring that you’re “long-term investors” and that you want to be “partners” with your investors, then closing a fund after 12-24 months, is toxic. It conveys some combination of the following three messages: (1) we’re panicked. (2) We have no ability to plan. (3) Pretty much everything we said when we launched the fund was cynical B.S. crafted by marketers who were, themselves, probably disgusted with us.

Which of those messages do you really want to be associated with?

Okay, back to the ranks of the walking dead and the dead dead after a short word of thanks to The Shadow, one of the stalwarts of our discussion board whose daily updates on the comings and goings is enormously helpful in keeping this list current.

Let’s go to Plan B: Under Plan A, Arden Alternative Strategies Fund (ARDNX) was slated to become Aberdeen Multi-Manager Alternative Strategies Fund (no ticker) on March 31, 2016. That made perfect sense since Aberdeen acquired Arden. Plan A survived for about a week when someone likely noticed that the fund wasn’t actually very good, was shrinking in size and required an annual expense subsidy from the adviser, whereupon Plan B emerged: kill it. Same date.

BPV Core Diversification Fund (BPADX) has closed and will be terminated on March 11, 2016. It’s a tiny, conservative fund that’s still managed to lose money over the past three years and trail 90% of its peers.

On February 17, 2016, the CGM Advisor Targeted Equity Fund (NEFGX, reflecting its birth name: New England Growth Fund) was liquidated. Financial Advisor magazine managed to wax nostalgic over the loss of a “venerable” and “once-vaunted” fund. Two quick notes about this: (1) the fund hasn’t earned its keep over the past 20 years. Its closing NAV was below its NAV in 1994. The 20 year performance chart is the very image of what to avoid in your investments:

And (2) you can still access the manager’s skills, if you’d like. Natixis, the fund’s sponsor, no longer has an ownership stake in CGM and so they had no interest in continuing to sponsor a fund. Mr. Heebner continues to run three other CGM funds. Their website would also win the award for the industry’s least useful.

Collins Alternative Solutions Fund (CLLAX) liquidated on February 26, 2016. The fund had about $19 million in assets and dropped 19% in its final year of operation.

Crystal Strategy Absolute Income Fund (CSTFX), Crystal Strategy Absolute Return Fund (CSRAX) and Crystal Strategy Absolute Return Plus Fund (CSLFX) will, based on the recommendation of Brinker Capital, LLC, the investment adviser, be liquidated on March 18, 2016. The funds are just past their second anniversary. Between them they have $16 million in assets and a sorrowful performance record.

Dreyfus Strategic Beta U.S. Equity Fund (DOUAX) will liquidate in mid-April.

The Fortress has fallen! Fortress Long/Short Credit Fund (LPLAX) liquidated on February 12, 2016, about three years too late. The fund lost about 25% over its lifetime. It peaked in December 2012 and its chart since then looks, for all the world, like a child’s drawing of steps leading down to the basement.

Frost International Equity Fund (FANTX) will liquidate on March 31, 2016. The announcement helpfully notes that they’ll refer to that as “the liquidation date.” I think I went on one of those in college.

Gottex Endowment Strategy Fund (GTEAX) is liquidating after about 20 months of operation. In that time it lost about 12% for its few investors.

Guidestone Real Assets Fund (GRAZX) will liquidate on April 29, 2016. It’s a tiny fund-of-funds that’s designed to protect you from inflation by investing in things that are cratering. That’s not intentional, of course, but sectors that would be durable if inflation arose – energy, natural resources, real estate – have been disasters.

The $3 million JPMorgan Asia Pacific Fund (JAPFX) will liquidate on April 6, 2016.

Investors in the Lazard Master Alternatives Portfolio (LALOX) need to find an alternative since the fund was liquidated on March 1, 2016. The fund was 14 months old.

MassMutual Barings Dynamic Allocation Fund (MLBAX) will be dissolved on July 8, 2016. It isn’t an awful tactical allocation fund but it’s tiny and misallocated in the last year, costing its investors 11.5%.

Merk Asian Currency Fund (MEAFX) liquidated on February 29, 2016. From inception in 2008 until liquidation, the fund was above water once, briefly, in 2011.

Meyers Capital Aggressive Growth Fund (MAGFX) liquidated on February 29, 2016, on about three weeks’ notice. Since the manager owns 87% of the funds’ shares, he might have seen it coming. The oddest development is the collapse of the fund’s asset base: in May, Mr. Meyers owned over $1,000,000 in fund shares. By February 2016,the fund only had $130,000 in assets.

Oberweis Asia Opportunities Fund (OBAOX) will be merged into Oberweis China Opportunities Fund (OBCHX) on or about April 29, 2016.

Philadelphia Investment Partners New Generation Fund (PIPGX), having lost 35% in the past 12 months, is now going to lose its head. The execution is March 30, 2016.

After the advisor concluded that Satuit Capital U.S. SMID Cap Fund (SATDX) was not economically viable, they decided “to close the Fund, wind up its affairs, liquidate its portfolio.” I’ve never seen “wind up its affairs,” which the announcement uses twice, in a fund liquidation filling before. Huh. The fund is not yet two years old and had attracted only a couple million, despite a really strong record. The deed is done on April 30, 2016.

Having concluded that the Smith Group Small Cap Focused Growth Fund (SGSVX) has “limited prospects for meaningful growth,” its board authorized liquidation of the fund on March 31, 2016. One can’t fault the managers for a lack of commitment: internal ownership accounted for about two-thirds of the fund’s $600,000 in assets.

Strategic Latin America Fund (SLATX) liquidated in late February, 2016. 

Touchstone Global Real Estate Fund (TGAAX) will liquidate on March 30, 2016. The board attributes the decision to “the Fund’s small size and limited growth potential.” An interim manager, apparently someone who specializes in “safeguard[ing] shareholder interests during the liquidation period,” has been appointed. It’s the sad case of a good fund not finding its audience: top 25% returns over the past five years and even better returns recently, but still only $17 million in assets.

Sometime in mid-summer Victory CEMP Multi-Asset Balanced Fund (CTMAX) will be absorbed by Victory Strategic Allocation Fund (SBALX). As is so often the case, CTMAX is larger and weaker so they’ll bury its record while tripling SBALX’s assets.

On February 5, 2016, Virtus Dynamic Trend Fund merged into Virtus Equity Trend Fund (VAPAX). I’m slightly startled to report that, despite trailing 98—99% of its peers over the intermediate term, VAPAX retains $1.5 billion in assets.

Wanger International Select (WAFFX) will liquidate at the end of March. It appears to be available only through insurance products.

WHV/EAM Emerging Markets Small Cap Equity Fund (WVEAX) and WHV/EAM International Small Cap Equity Fund (WHSAX), rather less than two years old, will liquidate on or about March 31, 2016. Both funds had very strong performance. WHV/Seizert Small Cap Value Equity Fund (WVSAX), a bit more than two years old, will liquidate a month later.

In Closing . . .

Thanks, as always, to folks who’ve supported the Observer in thought, word or deed. Welcome, especially, to Nick Burnett, long-time friend, grad school roommate and mastermind behind the CapRadioCurriculum which helps teachers connect public radio content with classroom lessons. There’s a cool one on multilingual public relations that I rather liked. Thanks, as ever to the ongoing generosity of the folks at Gardey Financial and our first subscribers, Deb and Greg. Thanks to Gary, who didn’t particularly want premium access but did want to help out. Mission accomplished, big guy! Too, to MaryRose, we’re trying to help. Welcome to Abdon Bolivar, working hard to get people to understand the role that plan administrators play in creating and sustaining bad options for investors. By coincidence, Tony Isola and the folks are Ritholtz Wealth Management are pursuing a parallel track trying to educate educators about what to do if they’re getting screwed by the 403(b). And, in a horrifying number of cases, they are.

And so, thanks to you all, not just for your support of the Observer but for all the good work you’re doing for a lot of people.

We’re waiting to talk with the folks at Otter Creek Partners, a hedge fund firm with a small long/short fund that’s performed splendidly. That conversation will let us finish up our profile of Otter Creek Long/Short Opportunity (OTCRX) and share it with you. We’ll add a look at Intrepid Endurance (ICMAX) in conjunction with my own portfolio review. We’ll look for the launch of Seafarer Overseas Value, likely around the 75^th day of 2016. We’ll look for you.

By David Snowball

Dear friends,

It’s the BOJ’s fault. Or the price of oil’s. Perhaps the Fed. Probably China. Possibly Putin. Likely ISIL (or Assad). Alternately small investors. (ETF.com assures us it’s definitely not the effect of rapid, block-trading of ETFs on the market, though.) It’s all an overreaction or, occasionally, a lagging one. Could be fears of recession or even fears of fears.

We don’t like randomness. That’s why conspiracy theories are so persistent: they offer simple, satisfying explanations for otherwise inexplicable occurrences. We want explanations and, frankly, the financial media are addicted to offering them. The list in that opening paragraph captures just some of the explanations offered by talking heads to explain January’s turbulence. Those same sages have offered prognostications for the year ahead, ranging from a “cataclysmic” 40% decline and advice to “sell everything” to 7-11% gains, the latter from folks who typically foresee 7-11% gains.

As I drove to campus the other day, watching a huge flock of birds take wing and wheel and listening to financial analysis, it occurred to me that these guys had about as much prospect of understanding the market as they do of understanding the birds’ ballet.

Open confession is good for the soul.

I have two confessions.

First, I can’t find the source of the quotation that serves as the title of this essay. I keep hitting a wall as “Scottish proverb,” with no further discussion. All too often that translates to “some hack at The Reader’s Digest in 1934 made it up and added ‘Scottish proverb’ to dignify the insight.”

Second, until I began this essay, I had only the vaguest idea of how my portfolio had done in 2015. I preach a single doctrine: make a good plan, execute the plan, get on with your life.

Make a good plan: My retirement portfolio is largely hostage to Augustana College. As part of a Retirement Plan Redesign task force a few years ago, we discovered that the college’s plan was too complicated (it offered over 800 funds) and too lax (under 30% of our employees contributed anything beyond the college’s 10% contribution).  The research was clear and we followed it: we dramatically reduced the fund of investment choices so that in each asset class folks had one active fund and one passive fund, installed a lifecycle fund as the default option, the college went from a flat contribution to a modestly more generous one based on a matching system, we auto-enrolled everyone in a payroll deduction which started at 4%, and automatically escalated their contributions annually until they reached 10%. It was, of course, possible to opt out but we counted on the same laziness that kept folks from opting in to keep them from opting out.

We were right. Ninety-some percent of employees now contribute to their own retirements, the amount of money sitting in money markets for years is dramatically reduced, the savings rate is at a record and more accounts seem to contain a mix of assets.

Yay for everyone but me! In pursuit of the common good, I helped strip out my own access to the Fidelity and T. Rowe Price funds that were central to my plan. Those funds are now in a “can’t add more” account and continue to do quite well. Both growth funds (Fidelity Growth Discovery, T. Rowe Price Blue Chip Growth) and international small caps (Fidelity Japan Smaller Companies, T. Rowe Price International Discovery) were thriving, while my substantial emerging markets exposure and a small inflation hedge hurt. In these later years of my career at the college, the vast bulk of my retirement contributions are going into a combination of the CREF Stock Account (60% of my portfolio, down 0.9% in 2015, up 10.5% annually over the past three years), TIAA Real Estate Account (25% of my portfolio, up 8% in 2015, up 10% annually over the past three years) and a TIAA-CREF Retirement Income fund (15% of the portfolio, flat in 2015, up 4.5% over three years) for broad-based fixed income exposure.

My non-retirement account starts with a simple asset allocation:

• 50% growth / 50% income
• Within growth, 50% domestic equities, 50% foreign
• Within domestic, 50% smaller companies, 50% larger
• Within foreign, 50% developed, 50% emerging
• Within income, 50% conservative, 50% venturesome.

I know that I could optimize the allocation by adjusting the exact levels of exposure to each class, but I don’t need the extra complexity in my life. In most of my funds, the managers have some wiggle room so that they’re not locked into a single narrow asset class. That makes managing the overall asset allocation a bit trickier, but manageable.

The roster of funds, ranked from my largest to smallest positions:

FPA Crescent FPACX	A pure play on active management.  Mr. Romick is willing to go anywhere and frequently does. He’s been making about 6% a year and has done exceptionally well mitigating down markets. The fund lost 2% in 2015, its third loss in 20 years.
T. Rowe Price Spectrum Income RPSIX	A broadly diversified fund of income funds. Low cost, low drama. It’s been making about 4% in a low-rate environment. The fund lost 2% in 2015, its third loss, and its second-worst, in a quarter century.
Artisan International Value ARTKX	A fund that I’ve owned since inception and one of my few equity-only funds. It’s made about 7% a year and its long-term performance is in the top 1% of its peer group. Closed to new investors.
RiverPark Short-Term High Yield RPHYX	An exceedingly conservative cash-substitute for me. I’m counting on it to beat pure cash by 2-3% a year, which it has regularly managed. Up about 1% in 2015. Closed to new investors.
Seafarer Overseas Growth & Income SFGIX	An outstanding EM equity fund that splits its exposure between pure EM stocks and firms domiciled in developed markets but serving emerging ones. Up about 10% since launch while its peers are down 18%. Down 4% in 2015 while its peers were down 14%.
Artisan Small Cap Value ARTVX	(sigh) More below.
Matthews Asian Growth & Income MACSX	Traditionally one of the least volatile ways to invest in the world’s most dynamic economies. I started here when Mr. Foster, Seafarer’s manager, ran the fund. When he launched Seafarer, I placed half of my MACSX position in his new fund. MACSX has continued to be a top-tier performer but might fall victim to a simplification drive.
RiverPark Strategic Income RSIVX	Mr. Sherman, the RPHYX manager, positions this as “one step out the risk-return spectrum” from his flagship fund. His expectation was to about double RPHYX’s return. He was well on his way to do exactly that until three bad investments and some market headwinds derailed performance over the past six months. Concern is warranted.
Matthews Asian Strategic Income MAINX	The argument here is compelling: the center of the financial universe is shifting to Asia but most investors haven’t caught up with that transition. Matthews is the best Asia-centered firm available in the US retail market and Ms. Kong, the manager, is one of their brightest stars. The fund made a lot of money in its first year but has pretty much broken even over the next three. Sadly, there’s no clear benchmark to help answer the question, “is that great or gross?”
Grandeur Peak Global Reach GPROX	The flagship fund for Grandeur Peak, a firm specializing in global small and microcap growth investing.  The research is pretty clear that this is about the only place where active managers have a persistent edge, and none have had greater success than G.P. The fund was up 8% in 2014 and down 0.6% in 2015, outstanding and respectable performances, respectively.
Northern Global Tactical Asset Allocation BBALX	Northern aspires to be a true global hybrid fund offering low-cost access to global stocks, bonds and alternatives. It looks terrible benchmarked against its US-centered peers but I’m not sure that’s an argument against it.
Grandeur Peak Global Microcap GPMCX	This was simply too intriguing to pass up: G.P. wanted  a tiny fund to invest in the world’s tiniest companies, potentially explosive firms that would need to grow a lot even to become microcaps. It was open by subscription only to current GP shareholders and hard-closed at $27.5 million even before it opened.
ASTON/River Road Long Short ARLSX	This is a very small position, started mostly because I like the guys’ clear thinking and disciplined approach. Having even a small amount in a fund lends me to pay more attention to it, which was the goal. Other than for 2014, it typically finishes in the top third of L/S funds.

Execute the plan. So what did I do in 2015? Added Grandeur Peak Global Microcap and set up a monthly auto-invest. I also (finally!) transferred my Seafarer holdings from Scottrade directly to Seafarer where I took advantage of their offer to make lower-cost institutional shares available to retail investors who met the retail minimum and established an auto-investing plan. Otherwise, it was mostly stay the course and invest monthly.

What’s up for 2016? Artisan Small Cap Value is on the chopping block. Assets in the fund are down nearly 90% from peak, reflecting year after wretched year of underperformance. This is one of my oldest holdings, I’ve owned it since the late 1990s and have substantial embedded capital gains. Three issues are pushing me toward the door:

1. The managers seem to have fallen into a value trap. Their discipline is explicitly designed to avoid “value traps,” but their dogged commitments to energy and industrials seem to have ensnared them.
2. They don’t seem to be able to get out. Perhaps I’m jaundiced, but their shareholder communications haven’t been inspiring. The theme is “we’re not going to change our discipline just because it’s not working right now.” My fear is that “disciplined” transitions too easily into “bunkered down.” I experienced something similar with Ron Muhlenkamp of Muhlenkamp Fund (MUHLX), which was brilliant for 15 years then rigidly rotten for a decade. Mr. Muhlenkamp’s mantra was “we’re not sacrificing our long-term discipline for short-term gains” which sounded grand and worked poorly. I know of few instances where once-great funds rebound from several consecutive years in the basement. The question was examined closely by Leigh Walzer of Trapezoid in his December 2015 essay, When Good Managers Go Bad.
3. Lead manager Scott Satterwhite is retiring in October. The transition has been underway for a long while now but (a) it’s still epochal and (b) performance during the transition has not been noticeable better.

I may surrender to Ed’s desire to have me simplify my portfolio. (Does he simplify his? No, not so far as I can tell.) That might mean moving the MACSX money into Seafarer. Maybe closing out a couple smaller holdings because they’re not financially consequential. My asset allocation is a bit overweight in international stocks right now, so I’m probably going to move some into domestic smaller caps. (Yes, I know. I’ve read the asset class projections but my time horizon is still longer than five to seven years.) And making some progress in debt reduction (I took out a home equity loan to handle some fairly-pressing repairs) would be prudent.

Get on with life. I’m planning on resuming my War on Lawns this spring. I’m having a Davenport firm design a rain garden, an area designed to slow the rush of water off my property during storms, for me and I’ll spend some weeks installing it. I’ll add a bunch of native plants, mostly pollinator-friendly, to another corner once overrun by lawn. Together, I think they’ll make my space a bit more sustainable. Baseball season (which my son interprets as “I need expensive new stuff” season) impends. I really need to focus on strengthening MFO’s infrastructure, now that more people are depending on it. And my academic department continues to ask, “how can we change our teaching to help raise diverse, first-generation college students to that same level of achievement that we’ve traditionally expected?” That’s exhausting but exciting because I think, done right, we can make a huge difference in the lives of lots of bright kids who’ve been poorly served in some of their high schools. As a kid whose parents never had the opportunity to finish high school (World War Two interrupted their teen years), my faith in the transformative power of teaching remains undimmed.

It’ll be a good year.

Emerging markets: About as cheap as it gets

In the course of our conversation about Leuthold Core Investment (LCORX), Doug Ramsay shared the observation that emerging markets stocks are painfully cheap. Leuthold’s chart, below, shows the price/earnings ratio based on five-year normalized earnings for E.M. stocks from 2004 to now. Valuations briefly touched a p/e of 31 in 2007 then fell to 8 within a year. As we end January 2016, prices for E.M. stocks hover within a point of their market-crisis lows.

And still Leuthold’s not investing in them. Their E.M. exposure in Core and Global (GLBLX) are both near all-time lows because their analytics don’t (yet) show signs of a turnaround. Still, Mr. Ramsay notes, “they look impossibly cheap.”

Investing in five-star funds? It’s not as daft as you’d think

We asked the good folks at Morningstar if they’d generate a list of all five-star funds from ten years ago, then update their star ratings from five years ago and today. I’d first seen this data several years ago when it had been requested by a Wall Street Journal reporter and shared with us. The common interpretation is “it’s not worth it, since five-star funds aren’t likely to remain five-star funds.”

I’ve always thought that was the wrong concern. Really, I’m less concerned about whether my brilliant manager remains absolutely brilliant than whether he turns wretched. Frankly, if my funds kept bouncing between “reasonable,” “pretty good” and “really good,” I’d be thrilled. That is, if they stay in the three- to five-star range over time, that’s perfectly respectable.

Chip took the data and converted it into a pivot table. (Up until then, I thought “pivot table” was just another name for a “lazy Susan.” Turns out it’s actually a data visualization tool. Who knew?)

Here’s how to read it. There were 354 five-star funds in 2005. Of those, only 16 fell to one-star by 2010. You can see that in the top-center box. Of those 16 one-star funds, none rebounded to five stars by 2015 and only two made it back to four stars. On the upside, 187 of the original 354 remained four- or five-star funds across the whole time period and 245 of 354 never dropped below three stars.

We clearly need to do some refinement of the data to see whether a few categories are highly resilient (for example, single-state muni bond funds might never change their star ratings) and, thus, skewing the results. On whole, though, it seems clear that “first to worst” is a pretty low probability outcome and “first to kinda regrettable” isn’t hugely more likely.

The original spreadsheet is in the Commentary section at MFO Premium, for what interest that holds.

This Time It Really Is Different!

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

 Kafka

So, time now for something of a follow-up to my suggestion of a year ago that a family unit should own no more than ten mutual funds. As some will recall, I was instructed by “She Who Must Be Obeyed” to follow my own advice and get our own number of fund investments down from the more than twenty-five where it had been. We are now down to sixteen, which includes money market funds. My first observation would be that this is not as easy to do as I thought it would be, especially when you are starting from something of an ark approach (one of these, two of those). It is far easier to do when you start to build your portfolio from scratch, when you can be ruthless about diversification. That is, you don’t really need two large cap growth or four value funds. You may only add a new fund if you get rid of an old fund. You are quite specific about setting out the reasons for investing in a fund, and you are equally disciplined about getting rid of it when the reasons for owning it change, e.g. asset bloat, change in managers, style drift, no fund managers who are in Boston, etc., etc.

Which brings me to a point that I think will be controversial – for most families, mutual fund ownership should be concentrated in tax-exempt (retirement accounts) if taxes matter. And mutual fund ownership in retirement accounts should emphasize passive investments to maximize the effects of lower fees on compounding. It also lessens the likelihood of an active manager shooting himself or herself in the foot by selling the wrong thing at the wrong time because of a need to meet redemptions, or dare I suggest it, panic or depression overwhelm the manager’s common sense in maintaining an investment position (which often hits short seller specialists more than long only investors, but that is another story for another day).

The reasons for this will become clearer as holdings come out for 12/31 and 3/31, as well as asset levels (which will let you know what redemptions are – the rumor is that they are large). It will also become pretty clear as you look at your tax forms from your taxable fund accounts and are wondering where the money will come from to pay the capital gains that were triggered by the manager’s need to raise funds (actually they probably didn’t need to sell to meet redemptions as they all have bank lines of credit in place to cover those periods when redemptions exceed cash on hand, but …..).

The other thing to keep in mind about index funds that are widely diversified (a total market fund for instance) – yes, it will lag on the upside against a concentrated fund that does well. But it will also do better on the downside than a concentrated fund that does not do well. Look at it this way – a fifty stock portfolio that has a number of three and four per cent positions, especially in the energy or energy services sector this past year, that has seen those decline by 50% or more, has a lot of ground to make up. A total stock market portfolio that has a thousand or more positions – one or two or twenty or thirty bad stocks, do not cripple it. And in retirement accounts, it is the compounding effect that you want. The other issue of course is that the index funds will stay fully invested in the indices, rather than be caught out underinvested because they were trying to balance out exiting positions with adding positions with meeting redemptions. The one exception here would be for funds where the inefficiencies of an asset class can lead to a positive sustainable alpha by a good active manager – look for that manager as one to invest with in either taxable or tax-exempt accounts.

China, China, China, All the Time

In both the financial print press and the financial media on television and cable, much of the “blame” for market volatility is attributed to nervousness about the Chinese economy, the Chinese stock market, in fact everything to do with China. There generally appear to be two sorts of stories about China these days. One recurring theme is that they are novices at capital markets, currencies, as well as dealing with volatility and transparency in their markets, and that this has exacerbated trends in the swings in the Shanghai market, which has spread to other emerging markets. Another element of this particular them is that China’s economy is slowing and was not transparent to begin with, and that lack of growth will flow through and send the rest of the world into recession. Now, mind you, we are talking about economic growth that by most accounts, has slowed from high single digits recently (above 7%) to what will be a range going forward of low to still mid-single digits (4 – 7%).

I think a couple of comments are in order about this first theme. One, the Shanghai market has very much been intended as a punter’s market, where not necessarily the best companies are listed (somewhat like Vancouver in Canada twenty-odd years ago). The best companies in China are listed on the Hong Kong market – always have been, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The second thing to be said is that if you think things happen in China by accident or because they have lost control, you don’t understand very much about China and its thousands of years of history. Let’s be realistic here – the currency is controlled, interest rates are controlled, the companies are controlled, the economy is controlled – so while there may be random events and undercurrents going on, they are probably not the ones we are seeing or are worried about.

This brings me to the second different theme you hear about China these days, which is that China and the Chinese economy have carried the global economy for the last several years, and that even last year, their contribution to the world economy was quite substantial. I realize this runs counter to stories that you hear emanating from Washington, DC these days, but much that you hear emanating from Washington now is quite surreal. But let’s look at a few things. China still has $3 trillion dollars of foreign exchange reserves. China does not look to be a debtor nation. China has really not a lot of places left to spend money domestically since they have a modern transportation infrastructure and, they have built lots of ghost cities that could be occupied by a still growing population. And while China has goods that are manufactured that they would like to export, the rest of the world is not in a buying mood. A rumor which I keep hearing, is that they have more than 30,000 metric tons of gold reserves with which to back their currency, should they so choose (by comparison, the US as of October 2014 was thought to have about 4,200 metric tons in Fort Knox).

For those familiar with magic shows and sleight of hand tricks, I think this is what we are seeing now. Those who watch the cable financial news shows come away with the impression that the world is ending in the Chinese equity markets, and that will cause the rest of the world to end as well. So while you are watching that, let’s see what you are missing. We have a currency that has become a second reserve currency to the world, supplanting the exclusive role of the U.S. dollar as countries that are commodity economies now price their commodities and do trade deals in Chinese currency. And, notwithstanding that, the prices of commodities have fallen considerably, we continue to see acquisition and investment in the securing of commodities (at fire sale prices) by China. And finally, we have a major expansion by China in Africa, where it is securing arable land to provide another bread basket for itself for the future, as well as an area to send parts of it population.

And let me suggest in passing that the one place China could elect to spend massively in their domestic economy is to build up their defense establishment far beyond what they have done to date. After all, President Reagan launched a massive arms build-up by the US during his terms in office, which in effect bankrupted the Soviets as they tried to keep up. One wonders whether we would or could try to keep up should China elect to do the same to us at this point.

So, dear readers, I will leave it to you to figure out which theme you prefer, although I suspect it depends on your time horizon. But let me emphasize again – looking at the equity markets in China means looking at the wrong things. By the end of this year, we should have a better sense of whether the industrial economy is China has undergone a rather strong recovery, driven by the wealth of a growing middle class (which is really quite entrepreneurial, and which to put it into context, should be approaching by the end of this year, 400M in size). And it will really also become clear that much of the capital that has been rumored to be “fleeing” China has to be split out to account for that which is investment in other parts of the world. Paying attention to those investment outflows will give you some insight as to why China still thinks of and refers to itself as, “The Middle Kingdom.”

— by Edward A. Studzinski

Looking for Bartolo Colon

by Leigh Walzer

Bartolo Colon is a baseball pitcher; he is the second oldest active major leaguer.  Ten years ago he won the coveted Cy Young award. Probably no investment firm has asked Colon for an endorsement but maybe they should. More on this shortly.

FROM THE MAILBAG:

A reader in Detroit who registered but has not yet logged into www.Fundattribution.com  writes: “We find little use for back tested or algorithmic results [and prefer an] index-based philosophy for clients.” 

Index funds offer a great approach for anyone who lacks the time or inclination to do their homework. We expect they will continue to gain share and pressure the fees of active managers.

Trapezoid does not advocate algorithmic strategies, as the term is commonly used. Nor do we oppose them. Rather, we rigorously test portfolio managers for skill. Our “null hypothesis” is that a low-cost passive strategy is best. We look for managers which demonstrate their worth, based on skill demonstrated over a sufficient period of time. Specifically, Honor Roll fund classes must have a 60% chance of justifying their expenses. Less than 10% of the fund universe satisfies this test.  Trapezoid does rate some quantitative funds, and we wrote in the November edition of Mutual Fund Observer about some of the challenges of evaluating them.

We do rely on quantitative methods, including back testing, to validate our tests and hone our understanding of how historic skill translates into future success.

VULCAN MIND MELD

A wealth manager (and demo client) from Denver asks our view of his favorite funds, Vulcan Value Partners (VVPLX). Vulcan was incepted December 2009.Prior to founding Vulcan, the manager, C.T. Fitzpatrick, worked for many years at Southeastern under famed value investor O. Mason Hawkins.  Currently it is closed to new investors.

VVPLX has performed very well in its 6 years of history. By our measure, investors accumulated an extra 20% compared to index funds based on the managers’ stock selection skill alone. We mentioned it favorably in the October edition of MFO.

Vulcan’s expense structure is 1.08%, roughly 90bps higher than an investor would require to hold a comparable ETF. Think of that as the expense premium to hire an active manager. Based on data through October, we assigned VVPLX a 55% probability of justifying its active expense premium. (This is down from 68% based on our prior evaluation using data through July 2015 and places them outside the Honor Roll.)

The wealth manager questioned why we classify VVPLX as large blend?  Vulcan describes itself as a value manager and the portfolio is heavily weighted toward financial services.

VVPLX is classified as large blend because, over its history, it has behaved slightly more like the large blend aggregate than large value. We base this on comparisons to indices and active funds. One of our upcoming features identifies the peer funds, both active and passive, which most closely resemble a given fund. For a majority of our funds, we supplement this approach by looking at historic holdings. We currently consider factors like the distribution of forward P/E ratios over time. Our categorization and taxonomy do not always conform to services like Morningstar and Lipper, but we do consider them as a starting point, along with the manager’s stated objective.  We frequently change classifications and welcome all input. While categories may be useful in screening for managers, we emphasize that the classifications have no impact on skill ratings, since we rely 100% on objective criteria such as passive indices.

The client noted we identified a few managers following similar strategies to VVPLX who were assigned higher probabilities. How is this possible considering VVPLX trounced them over its six-year history?

Broadly speaking, there are three reasons:

• Some of the active managers who beat out VVPLX had slightly lower expenses.
• While VVPLX did very well since 2010, some other funds have proven themselves over much longer periods. We have more data to satisfy ourselves (and our algorithms) that the manager was skillful and not just lucky. 
• VVPLX’s stock selection skill was not entirely consistent which also hurts its case. From April to October, the fund recorded negative skill of approximately 4%. This perhaps explain why management felt compelled to close the fund 4/22/15.

Exhibit I

		Mgr. Tenure	sS*	sR*	Proj.  Skill (Gross)	Exp.	∆	±	Prob.
Boston Partners All-Cap Value Fund [c]	BPAIX	2005	1.4%	0.3%	0.88%	0.80%(b)	23	1.5%	56.1
Vulcan Value Partners Fund	VVPLX	2010	3.8%	1.5%	1.19%	1.08%	.25	1.8%	55.2

1. Annualized contribution from stock selection or sector rotation over manager tenure
2. Expenses increased recently by 10bps as BPAIX’s board curtailed the fee waiver
3. Closed to new investors

Exhibit II: Boston Partners All-Cap Value Fund

Exhibit I compares VVPLX to Boston Partners All-Cap Value Fund. BPAIX is on the cusp of value and blend, much like VVPLX. Our model sees a 56.1% chance that the fund’s skill over the next 12 months will justify its expense structure. According to John Forelli, Senior Portfolio Analyst, the managers screen from a broader universe using their own value metrics. They combine this with in-depth fundamental analysis. As a result, they are overweight sectors like international, financials, and pharma relative to the Russell 3000 (their avowed benchmark.) Boston Partners separately manages approximately $10 billion of institutional accounts which closely tracks BPAIX.

Any reader with the www.fundattribution.com demo can pull up the Fund Analysis for VVPLX.  The chart for BPAIX is not available on the demo (because it is categorized in Large Value) so we present it in Exhibit II.  Exhibit III presents a more traditional attribution against the Russell 3000 Value Fund. Both exhibits suggest Boston Partners are great stock pickers. However, we attribute much less skill to Allocation because our “Baseline Return” construes they are not a dyed-in-the-wool value fund.

VVPLX has shown even more skill over the manager’s tenure than BPAIX and is expected to have more skill next year^[1]. But even if VVPLX were open, we would prefer BPAIX due to a combination of cost and longer history. (BPAIX investors should keep an eye on expenses: the trustees recently reduced the fee waiver by 10bps and may move further next year.)

Trapezoid has identified funds which are more attractive than either of these funds. The Trapezoid Honor Roll consists of funds with at least 60% confidence. The methodology behind these findings is summarized at here.

^[1] 12 months ending November 2016.

VETERAN BENEFITS

Our review of VVPLX raises a broader question. Investors often have to choose between a fund which posted stellar returns for a short period against another whose performance was merely above average over a longer period.

For those of you who watched the World Series a few months ago, the NY Mets had a number of very young pitchers with fastballs close to 100 miles per hour.  They also had some veteran pitchers like John Niese and the 42-year-old ageless wonder Bartolo Colon who couldn’t muster the same heat but had established their skill and consistency over a long period of time. We don’t know whether Bartolo Colon drank from the fountain of youth; he served a lengthy suspension a few years ago for using a banned substance. But his statistics in his 40s are on par with his prime ten year ago.  

Unfortunately, for every Bartolo Colon, there is a Dontrelle Willis. Willis was 2003 NL Rookie of the year for the Florida Marlins and helped his team to a World Series victory. He was less effective his second year but by his third year was runner up for the Cy Young award. The “D-Train” spent 6 more years in the major leagues; although his career was relatively free of injuries, he never performed at the same level.

Extrapolating from a few years of success can be challenging. If consistency is so important to investors, does it follow that a baseball team should choose the consistent veterans over the promising but less-tested young arms?

Sometimes there is a tradeoff between expected outcome (∆) and certitude (±).  The crafty veteran capable of keeping your team in the game for five innings may not be best choice in the seventh game of the World Series; but he might be the judicious choice for a general manager trying to stretch his personnel budget. The same is true for investment managers. Vulcan may have the more skillful management team. But considering its longevity, consistency, and expense Boston Partners is the surer bet.

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH

How long a track record is needed before an investor can bet confident in a portfolio manager? This is not an easy question to answer.

In the December edition of MFO (When_Good_Managers_Go_Bad) we profiled the Clearbridge Aggressive Growth fund which rode one thesis successfully for 20 years. Six years of data might tell us less about them than a very active fund.   

Here is one stab at answering the question.  We reviewed the database to see what percentage of fund made the Trapezoid Honor Roll as a function of manager tenure. 

Recall the Trapezoid Honor Roll consists of fund classes for which we have 60% confidence that future skill will justify expense structure.  In Exhibit IV the Honor Roll fund classes are shown in blue while the funds we want no part of are in yellow.  16% of those fund classes where the manager has been on the job for twenty-five years make the Honor Roll compared with just 2% for those on the job less than three years.  The relationship is not a smooth line, but generally managers with more longevity give us more data points allowing us to be more confident of their skill.. or more likely persuade us they lack sufficient skill. 

There is an element of “survivorship” bias in this analysis. Every year 6% of funds disappear; generally, they are the smallest or worst performers. “All-stars” managers are more likely to survive for 20 years. But surprisingly a lot of “bad” managers survive for a long time. The percentage of yellow funds increases just as quickly as the blue.

It seems reasonable to ask why so many “bad” managers survive in a Darwinian business. We surveyed the top 10. (Exhibit V) We find that in the aggregate they have a modicum of skill, but nowhere sufficient to justify what they charge.  We can say with high confidence all these investors would be better off in index funds or (ideally) the active managers on the Trapezoid honor roll.

We haven’t distinguished between a new manager who takes over an old fund and a brand new fund. Should investors abandon all their confidence when a good manager retires and passes the baton? Should investors give the fund a mulligan when a poor performer is replaced?  Probably not.  From a review of 840 manager changes with sufficient data (Exhibit VI), strong performers tend to remain strong which suggests we may gain confidence by considering the track record of the previous manager.

The “rookie confidence” problem is a challenge for investors. The average manager tenure is about six years and only a quarter of portfolio managers have been on the job longer than 10 years. It is also a challenge for asset managers marketing a new fund or a new manager of an existing fund.  Without a long track record, it is hard to tell if a fund is good – investors have every incentive to stick with the cheaper index fund.  Asset managers incubate funds to give investors a track record but studies suggest investors shouldn’t take much comfort from incubated track records. (Richard Evans, CFA Digest, 2010.) We see many sponsors aggressively waiving fees for their younger funds.  Investors will take comfort when the individuals have a prior track record at another successful fund.  C.T. Fitzpatrick’s seventeen years’ experience under Mason Hawkins seems to have carried over to Vulcan.

BOTTOM LINE:  It is hard to gain complete trust that any active fund is better than an index fund. It is harder when a new captain takes the helm, and harder yet for a brand new fund. The fund with the best five-year record is not necessarily the best choice. Veteran managers are over represented in the Trapezoid Honor Roll — for good reason.

Unlike investing, baseball will always have rookies taking jobs from the veterans. But in 2016 we can still root for Bartolo Colon.

Why are investors so bad at picking alternatives?

By Sam Lee, principal of Severian Asset Management and former editor of Morningstar ETF Investor.

Gateway (GATEX) is the $8 billion behemoth of the long-short equity mutual fund category, and one of the biggest alternative mutual funds. I’ve long marveled at this fund’s size given its demonstrable lack of merit as a portfolio diversifier. Over the past 10 years the fund has behaved like an overpriced, underperforming 40% stock, 60% cash portfolio. Its R-squared over this period to the U.S. stock market index is 0.85.

Not only is its past performance damning, but little in the substance of the strategy suggests performance will radically change. Gateway owns a basket of stocks designed to track the S&P 500, with a slight dividend tilt. On this portfolio the managers sell calls on the S&P 500, capping the potential upside of the fund in exchange for a premium up front, and simultaneously buy puts, capping the potential downside of the fund at the cost of a premium up front. By implementing this “collar” strategy, the managers protect the portfolio from extreme ups and downs.

There is another way to soften volatility: Own less equities and more cash—which is pretty much what this fund achieves in a roundabout manner.

Portfolio theory says that an investment is only attractive to the extent that it improves the risk-adjusted return of a portfolio. That means three things matter for each asset: expected return, expected volatility, and expected correlation with other assets in the portfolio. The first two are intuitive, but many investors neglect the correlation piece. A low return, high volatility asset can be an excellent investment if it has a low enough correlation with the rest of the portfolio.

Consider an asset that’s expected to return 0% with stock-like volatility and a perfectly negative correlation to the stock market (meaning it moves in the opposite direction of the market without fail). Many investors, looking at the asset’s standalone returns and volatility, would be turned off. Someone fluent in portfolio theory would salivate. Assume the expected excess return of the stock market is 5%. If you own the stock market and the negatively correlated asset in equal measure, the portfolio’s expected excess return halves to 2.5% and its expected volatility drops to 0%. Apply some leverage to double the portfolio’s return and you end up with a 5% expected excess return with no volatility.

In practice, many investors do not assess assets from the portfolio perspective. They fixate on standalone return and volatility. Much of the time this is a harmless simplification. But it can go wrong when assessing alternatives, such as with Gateway. Judged by its Sharpe ratio and other risk-adjusted measures, Gateway looks like a reasonable investment. Judged by its ability to enhance a portfolio’s risk-adjusted return, it falls flat.

I don’t believe individual investors are responsible for Gateway’s size. If anything, institutional investors (particularly RIAs) are to blame. You would think that supposedly sophisticated investors would not fall into this trap. But they do. A large part of the blame belongs to committee-driven investment processes, which dominate institutional money management. When a committee is responsible for a portfolio, they often hire consultants. These consultants in turn promise to help members of the committee avoid getting fired or sued.

In this context, the consultants like to create model portfolios that have predefined allocations to investment types—X% in large growth, Y% in small-cap value, Z% in long-short equity, and so on—and then find suitable managers within those categories. When picking those managers, they tend to focus on return and volatility as well as performance relative to peers. If not done carefully, a fund like Gateway gets chosen, despite its utter lack of diversifying power.

 

Smallest, Shortest, Lowest

David invariably cuts to the chase when it comes to assessing mutual funds. It’s a gift he shares with us each month.

So, in evolving the MFO Premium site, he suggested we provide lists of funds satisfying interesting screening criteria to help users get the most from our search tools.

Last month we introduced two such lists: “Best Performing Rookie Funds” and “Dual Great Owl & Honor Roll Funds.”

This month our MultiSearch screener incorporates three more: “Smallest Drawdown Fixed Income Funds,” “Shortest Recovery Time Small Caps,” and “Lowest Ulcer Moderate Allocation Funds.”

Smallest Drawdown Fixed Income Funds generates a list of Fixed Income (e.g., Bond, Muni) funds that have experienced the smallest levels of Maximum Drawdown (MAXDD) in their respective categories. More specifically, they are in the quintile of funds with smallest MAXDD among their peers.

Looking back at performance since the November 2007, which represents the beginning of the current full market cycle, we find 147 such funds. Two top performing core bond funds are TCW Core Fixed-Income (TGCFX) and RidgeWorth Seix Total Return (SAMFX). The screen also uncovered notables like First Pacific Advisors’ FPA New Income (FPNIX) and Dan Ivascyn’s PIMCO Income (PIMIX).

Here are some risk/return metrics for these Fixed Income funds (click on images to enlarge):

TCW Core Fixed-Income (TGCFX) and RidgeWorth Seix Total Return (SAMFX)

First Pacific Advisors’ FPA New Income (FPNIX)

PIMCO Income (PIMIX)

Shortest Recovery Time Small Caps generates a list of Small Cap (Small Core, Small Value, Small Growth) funds that have incurred shortest Recovery Times (number of months a fund retracts from previous peak) in their respective categories.

For Full Cycle 5, this screen produces 62 such funds through December 2015. Among the best performing funds with shortest Recovery Times, under 30 months, only one remains open and/or accessible: Queens Road Small Cap Value (QRSVX). It was profiled by David in April 2015.

Here’s a short list and risk/return numbers for QRSVX across various timeframes:

Queens Road Small Cap Value (QRSVX)

Lowest Ulcer Moderate Allocation Funds generates a list of Mixed Asset Moderate Allocation funds that have incurred the lowest Ulcer Indices in their respective categories. 

Topping the list (fund with lowest UI) is James Balanced: Golden Rainbow (GLRBX), profiled last August :

The Alt Perspective: Commentary and news from DailyAlts.

We can all be thankful that January 2016 is over. I am at a point in my life where I don’t really enjoy rollercoaster rides, of any sort, as much as I did when I was younger. And this past month has been nothing short of a financial rollercoaster. In many ways, however, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that investors decided to take some air out of the balloon.

In a grand experiment, the central banks around the world have been pumping hot air into the global market balloon since November 2008. But the U.S. Fed officially took its foot off the gas pedal and applied a bit of light pressure to the brakes with its scant rate rise in December. And on top of that, China’s slowdown has raised concerns of contagion, and its equity markets have taken the brunt of that concern.

With all of the re-adjustments of market expectations and valuations currently taking place, 2016 may turn out to be quite a good year to be invested in alternatives.

Performance Review

Let’s start with traditional asset classes for the month of January 2015, where the average mutual fund for all of the major equity markets (per Morningstar) delivered negative performance in the month:

• Large Blend U.S. Equity: -6.95%
• Small Blend U.S. Equity: -9.18%
• Foreign Equity Large Blend: -7.32%
• Diversified Emerging Markets: -6.46%
• Intermediate Term Bond: 0.94%
• World Bond: -0.03%
• Moderate Allocation: -4.36%

Now a look at the liquid alternative categories, per Morningstar’s classification. Only Managed Futures and Bear Market funds generated positive returns in January, as one would expect. Long/Short Equity was down more than expected, but with small cap stocks being down just over 9%, it is not a surprise. Multi-alternative funds held up well, as did market neutral funds.

• Long/Short Equity: -4.18%
• Non-Traditional Bonds: -1.15%
• Managed Futures: 2.34%
• Market Neutral: -0.22%
• Multi-Alternative: -1.65%
• Bear Market: 11.92%

And a few non-traditional asset classes, where none escaped January’s downdraft:

• Commodities: -3.01%
• Multi-Currency: -0.49%
• Real Estate: -5.16%
• Master Limited Partnerships: -9.77%

Overall, a mixed bag for January.

Asset Flows

One of the more surprising aspects of 2015 was the concentration of asset flows into multi-alternative funds and managed futures funds. All other categories of funds, except for volatility funds, experienced outflows over the full twelve months of 2015, as documented in the below chart:

And despite the massive outflows from non-traditional bonds, the category remains the largest with more than $135 billion in assets. This compares to commodities at $67 billion and multi-alternative at $56 billion.

Hot Topics

Only six new liquid alternative funds were launched in January – four were long/short equity funds, one was a managed futures fund and the sixth was a non-traditional bond fund. Of the six funds, two were ETFs, and fairly innovative ETFs at that. We wrote about their structure in an article titled, Reality Shares Builds Suite of Dividend-Themed ETFs.

On the research front, we published summaries of two important research papers in January, both of which have been popular with readers:

• Using Active Share to Evaluate High-Yield Bond Portfolios – An interesting look at how to use active share to evaluate fixed income portfolios.
• Using Momentum and Hedge Funds to Build a Better Portfolio – It is often documented how hedge funds can help a traditionally allocated portfolio, but this article takes a look at a research paper that proposes something a bit different.

If you would like to keep up with all the news from DailyAlts, feel free to sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter.

I’ll be back next month, and until then, let’s hope the rollercoaster ride that started in January has come to an end.

Observer Fund Profiles:

Each month the Observer provides in-depth profiles of between two and four funds. Our “Most Intriguing New Funds” are funds launched within the past couple years that most frequently feature experienced managers leading innovative newer funds. “Stars in the Shadows” are older funds that have attracted far less attention than they deserve.

Cognios Market Neutral Large Cap (COGMX): this tiny fund does what its category is supposed to do, but never has. It makes good money even when the market stinks.

Leuthold Core Investment (LCORX): We celebrate the 20^th anniversary of Leuthold Core, a singularly disciplined and adaptive fund. Just one more year and it will be old enough to drink! We’re hopeful that the markets don’t give it, or us, reason to.

RiverNorth Opportunities (RIV): This is the closed-end fund for serious investors who know there’s a lot of money to be made in the irrational pricing of closed-end funds, but who don’t have the time or expertise to construct such a portfolio on their own.

Launch Alert: Davenport Balanced Income (DBALX)

Most folks haven’t heard of the Davenport Funds, which is understandable but also too bad. Davenport & Company is an employee-owned investment adviser that’s headquartered in Richmond, VA. They’ve been around since 1863 and now “custodies more than $20 billion in assets.” They manage five no-load funds, all somewhere in the solid-to-excellent range. Their newest fund, Davenport Balanced Income, launched on December 30, 2015.

Three things worth knowing:

1. The equity portion of the portfolio mirrors the holdings of the Davenport Value and Income Fund (DVIPX). All Davenport funds target firms with exceptionally high levels of insider equity ownership. Value & Income, in particular, targets three investment themes: Dividend Aristocrats, High Yielders with Capital Appreciation Potential and deep-value Contrarian/Special Situations.
2. Value and Income has performed exceedingly well. The fund just celebrated its fifth anniversary. Morningstar places it in the top 4% of all large value funds since inception. Perhaps more importantly, it significantly outperformed its peers in 2015 and again in 2016’s choppy first month. Since inception, its returns have been about a third higher than its equity income peers while all measures of its volatility have been lower. Based on the conventional measures of risk-adjusted return (Sharpe, Martin and Sortino ratios or Ulcer Index), it’s a Top 20 equity income fund.
3. The equity allocation is fluid, ranging from 25 to 75% of assets. The balance between the two sleeves is determined by the managers’ analysis of “economic trends, changes in the shape of the yield curve and sector analysis.” The income portion of the portfolio is invested for stability rather than appreciation.

John Ackerly, one of Davenport’s directors, claims they have “a long history of developing funds that manage downside risk and produce positive returns … over full market cycles.” The equity portion of the fund is managed by Davenport’s Investment Policy Committee; the fixed-income portion by two of the guys who manage their fixed-income separate accounts. Their managers have, on average, 30 years of experience. Expenses are capped at 1.25%. The minimum initial investment is $5,000 for regular accounts and $2,000 for tax-advantaged ones. More details are at Davenport Asset Management, with the funds linked under the Strategies tab.

Manager Changes

There’s always churn in the manager ranks. This month we tracked down changes at 67 equity or balanced funds. While no cry out “sea change!”, three fairly well-known Fidelity managers – Peter Saperstone, Adam Kutas and Charles Myers – are having their responsibilities changed. Mr. Kutas drops Latin America to focus on EMEA. Mr. Myers takes a six-month leave of absence starting in March. Mr. Saperstone has been steadily moving away for months. I also discovered that I don’t recognize the names of any of the Janus managers (except, of course, Mr. Gross).

Updates

Speaking of Mr. Gross, his Janus Unconstrained Bond (JUCAX) fund’s performance chart looks like this:

So far the fund has been above water for about one month, April 2015, since Mr. Gross came on board. That said, it certainly shows a dogged independence compared to its nontraditional bond peers (the orange line). And it does look a lot better than Miller Income Opportunity Fund (LMCJX), Legg Mason’s retirement gift to former star Bill Miller. Mr. Miller co-manages the fund with his son. Together they’ve managed to lose about 24% for their investors in the same period that Mr. Gross dropped two or three.

Briefly Noted . . .

There was a great thread on our discussion board about the fate of the Berwyn Funds. The Berwyn funds are advised by The Killen Group. The founder, Robert E. Killen, turned 75 and has chosen to sell his firm to the Chartwell Investment Partners. The fear is that Chartwell will use this as an opportunity to vacuum up assets. Their press release on the acquisition reads, in part:

“This transaction creates an investment management firm with annual revenues approaching $50 million and more than $10 billion in assets under management, as part of our well-defined strategy for growing our Chartwell Investment Partners business into a world-class asset manager,” TriState Capital Chief Executive Officer James F. Getz said. “We have an exceptional opportunity to combine Killen’s highly credible investment performance, particularly by the Morningstar five-star rated Berwyn Income Fund, with our proven national financial services distribution model to meaningfully accelerate growth in client assets….”

The fate of Berwyn’s small no-load shareholders seems unresolved.

Thanks, in passing but as always, to The Shadow, the indomitable Ted and the folks on our discussion board. They track down more cool stuff, and think more interesting thoughts, than about any group I know. I browse their work daily and learn a lot.

GoodHaven Fund (GOODX) is reorganizing itself. The key change is that it will have a new board of trustees, rather than relying on a board provided by the Professionally Managed Portfolios trust.

Effective at the end of January, 2016, the Innealta Capital Country Rotation (ICCNX) and Capital Sector Rotation (ICSNX) funds no longer include “consistent with the preservation of capital” as part of their investment objectives.

Manning & Napier has agreed to acquire a majority interest in Rainier Investment Management, the investment adviser to the Rainier Funds. 

Effective February 1, 2016, the T. Rowe Price Mid-Cap Index Fund and the T. Rowe Price Small-Cap Index Fund were added as options for all of the T. Rowe Price Retirement Fund. 

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

Buffalo Emerging Opportunities Fund (BUFOX) and the Buffalo Small Cap Fund (BUFSX) have re-opened to new investors. They were closed for three and six years, respectively. Both funds posted wretched performance in 2014 and 2015 which might be a sign of disciplined investors out of step with an undisciplined market.

The Fairholme Focused Income (FOCIX) and Allocation (FAAFX) funds have reduced their minimum initial investment from $25,000 to $10,000.

Effective January 29, 2016, the redemption fee for the TCM Small Cap Growth Fund (TCMSX) was removed and the fund reduced its minimum initial investment from $100,000 to $2,500. It’s actually a pretty solid little small-growth fund.

Tweedy, Browne Global Value Fund II -Currency Unhedged (the “Fund”) reopened to new investors on February 1, 2016.

Effective as of January 1, 2016, the Valley Forge Fund’s (VAFGX) advisor, Boyle Capital Management, LLC, has voluntarily agreed to waive the full amount of its management fee. The voluntary waiver may be discontinued at any time. It was always a cute, idiosyncratic little fund run by a guy named Bernie Klawans. The sort of fund that had neither a website nor an 800 number. Bernie passed away at age 90, having run the fund until the last six months of his life. His handpicked successor died within the year. The Board of Trustees actually ran the fund for six months. Their eventual choice for a new manager did okay for a year, then performance fell off a cliff in the middle of 2014.

It’s never recovered and the fund is down to $7 million in assets, down by two-thirds since Mr. Klawan’s passing.

Vanguard Treasury Money Market Fund (VUSXX) has re-opened to all investors without limitations. It’s been charging four basis points and returning one basis point a year for the past three.

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

AQR Style Premia Alternative Fund and AQR Style Premia Alternative LV Fund will both close to new investors on March 31, 2016. AQR’s Diversified Arbitrage Risk Parity and Multi-Strategy Alternative funds closed in 2012 and 2013. Sam Lee did a really strong analysis of the two Style Premia funds in our September 2015 issue.

Ziegler Strategic Income Fund (ZLSCX) has liquidated its Investor share class and has converted the existing Investor Class accounts into institutional accounts.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

The American Independence funds announced five name changes, including shortening American Independence to AI.

Old Name	New Name
American Independence JAForlines Risk-Managed Allocation	AI JAForlines Risk-Managed Allocation
American Independence International Alpha Strategies	AI Navellier International
American Independence Boyd Watterson Core Plus	AI Boyd Watterson Core Plus
American Independence Kansas Tax-Exempt Bond	AI Kansas Tax-Exempt Bond
American Independence U.S. Inflation-Indexed	AI U.S. Inflation-Protected

Aston Small Cap Fund (ATASX) – formerly Aston TAMRO Small Cap – is soon-to-be AMG GW&K Small Cap Growth Fund.

On January 28, 2016, Centre Global Select Equity Fund became Centre Global ex-U.S. Select Equity Fund (DHGRX). Not entirely sure why “Global ex-US” isn’t “International,” but maybe they had some monogrammed stationery that they didn’t want to throw out.

Effective on February 19, 2016, Columbia Intermediate Bond Fund (LIBAX) becomes Columbia Total Return Bond Fund. 

On February 1, 2016, Ivy Global Real Estate Fund (IREAX) became Ivy LaSalle Global Real Estate Fund, and Ivy Global Risk-Managed Real Estate Fund changed to Ivy LaSalle Global Risk-Managed Real Estate Fund (IVRAX). For the past three years, both funds have been sub-advised by Lasalle Investment Management. IVRAX has performed splendidly; IREAX, not so much.

Silly reader. You thought it was Touchstone Small Cap Core Fund. Actually it’s just Touchstone Small Cap Fund (TSFAX). Now, anyway.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

“Because of the difficulty encountered in distributing the Fund’s shares,” 1492 Small Cap Core Alpha Fund (FNTSX) will liquidate on February 26, 2016. The fact that it’s not very good probably contributed to the problem.

American Beacon Retirement Income and Appreciation Fund and American Beacon Treasury Inflation Protected Securities Fund ( ) will be liquidated and terminated on March 31, 2016. Presumably that’s part of the ongoing house-cleaning as American Beacon tries to reposition itself as a sort of alternatives manager.

Anfield Universal Fixed Income Fund (AFLEX) liquidated two of its share classes (A1 and R) on February 1, 2016. Rather than moving those investors into another share class, they received a check in the mail and a tax bill. Odd. 

ASTON/TAMRO International Small Cap Fund (AROWX) liquidated on February 1, 2016. On the one hand, it only had $2 million in assets. On the other, the adviser pulled the plug after just a year. The manager, Waldemar Mozes, is a bright guy with experience at Artisan and Capital Group. He jokingly described himself as “the best fund manager ever to come from Transylvania.” We wish him well.

Columbia Global Inflation-Linked Bond Plus Fund liquidated after very short notice, on January 29, 2016.

Gator Opportunities Fund (GTOAX) thought it had to hang on until March 21, 2016. The board has discovered that a swifter execution would be legal, and now it’s scheduled to disappear on February 15, 2016.

Hodges Equity Income Fund (HDPEX) will merge into Hodges Blue Chip Equity Income Fund (currently named the Hodges Blue Chip 25 Fund HDPBX) at the end of March, 2016.

Its board simultaneously announced new managers for, and liquidation of, KF Griffin Blue Chip Covered Call Fund (KFGAX). The former occurred on January 6, the latter is slated for February 16, 2016.

Madison Large Cap Growth Fund (MCAAX) merges into Madison Investors (MNVAX) on February 29, 2016,

Don’t blink: McKinley Non-U.S. Core Growth Fund (MCNUX) will be gone by February 5, 2016. It was an institutional fund with a minimum investment of $40 million and assets of $37 million, so ….

Midas Magic (MISEX) and Midas Perpetual Portfolio (MPERX) are both slated to merge into Midas Fund (MIDSX). In reporting their taxable distributions this year, Midas announced that “One of Midas’ guiding principles is that we will communicate with our shareholders and prospective investors as candidly as possible because we believe shareholders and prospective investors benefit from understanding our investment philosophy and approach.” That makes it ironic that there’s no hint about why they’ve folding a diversified equity fund and a tactical allocation fund into a gold portfolio with higher fees than either of the other two.

We previously noted the plan to merge the Royce European Small-Cap and Global Value funds into Royce International Premier, pending shareholder approval. The sheep baa’ed shareholders approved the mergers, which will be executed sometime in February, 2016.

On March 24, 2016, Sentinel Mid Cap Fund (SNTNX) will be absorbed by Sentinel Small Company Fund (SAGWX), which have “identical investment objectives and similar investment strategies.” That’s a clear win for the investors, give or take any actual interest in investing in mid-caps. At the same time, Sentinel Sustainable Mid Cap Opportunities Fund (WAEGX) will be absorbed into Sentinel Sustainable Core Opportunities Fund (MYPVX).

TeaLeaf Long/Short Deep Value Fund (LEFAX) closed on January 25 and liquidated on January 29, 2016.

I’m okay with the decision to liquidate UBS U.S. Equity Opportunity Fund (BNVAX): it’s a tiny fund that’s trailed 98% of its peers over the past decade. The UBS board decided you needed to hear their reasoning for the decision, which they included in a section entitled:

Rationale for liquidating the Fund

Based upon information provided by UBS Asset Management (Americas) Inc., the Fund’s investment advisor, the Board determined that “it is in the best interests of the Fund and its shareholders to liquidate and dissolve the Fund pursuant to a Plan of Liquidation (the “Plan”). To arrive at this decision, the Board considered factors that have adversely affected, and will continue to adversely affect, the ability of the Fund to conduct its business and operations in an economically viable manner.”

Quick note to the board: that’s not a rationale. It’s a conclusion (“it’s in your best interest”) and a cryptic passage about the process “we considered factors.”

The Board of Trustees of Monetta Trust has concluded “that it would be in the best interests of the Fund and its shareholders” to liquidate Varsity/Monetta Intermediate Bond Fund (MIBFX), which will occur on February 18, 2016.

Vivaldi Orinda Hedged Equity Fund (OHEAX) is victim of its advisor’s “strategic decision to streamline its product offerings.” The fund will liquidate on February 26, 2016.

Voya Emerging Markets Equity Dividend Fund (IFCAX) will liquidate on April 8, 2016.

In Closing . . .

Please do double-check to see if you’ve set our Amazon link as a bookmark or starting tab in your browser. From Christmas 2014 to Christmas 2015, Amazon’s sales rose 60% but our little slice of the pie fell by 15% in the same period. We try not to be too much of a pesterance on the subject, but the Amazon piece continues as a financial mainstay so it helps to mention it.

If you’re curious about how the Amazon Associates program works, here’s the short version: if you enter Amazon using our link, an invisible little piece of text (roughly: “for the benefit of MFO”) follows you. When you buy something, that tag is attached to your order and we receive an amount equivalent to 6% or so of the value of the stuff ordered. It’s invisible and seamless from your perspective, and costs nothing extra. Sadly the tag expires after a day so if you put something in your cart on Guy Fawkes Day and places the order on Mardi Gras, the link will have expired.

Thanks, too, to the folks whose ongoing support makes it possible for us to keep the lights on (and even to upgrade them to LEDs!). That includes the growing cadre of folks using MFO Premium but also Paul R and Jason B, our most faithful subscribers Deb and Greg, the good folks at Andrei Financial and Gardey Financial and Carl R. (generous repeat offenders in the “keep MFO going” realm).

We’re about 90% done on a profile of the “new” LS Opportunity Fund (LSOFX), so that’s in the pipeline for March. Readers and insiders both have been finding interesting options for us to explore which, with Augustana’s spring break occurring in February, I might actually have time to!

We’ll look for you.

By David Snowball

Dear friends,

Talk about sturm und drang. After 75 days with in which the stock market rose or fell by 1% or more, the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index managed to roar ahead to a gain … of 0.29%. Almost 3000 mutual funds hung within two percentage points, up or down, of zero. Ten managed the rare feat of returning precisely zero. Far from a Santa Claus rally, 2015 couldn’t even manage a Grinchy Claus one.

And the Steelers lost to the Ravens. Again! Just rip my heart out, why doncha?

Annus horribilis or annus mediocris?

In all likelihood, the following three statements described your investment portfolio: your manager lost money, you suspect he’s lost touch with the market, and you’re confused.

Welcome to the club! 2015 saw incredibly widespread disappointment for investors. Investors saw losses in:

• 8 of 9 domestic equity categories, excluding large growth
• 17 of 17 asset allocation categories, from retirement income to tactical allocation
• 8 of 15 international stock categories
• 14 of 15 taxable bond categories and
• 6 of 6 alternative or hedged fund categories.

Anything that smacked of “real assets” (energy, MLPs, natural resources) or Latin America posted 20-30% declines. Foreign and domestic value strategies, regardless of market cap, trailed their growth-oriented peers by 400-700 basis points. The average hedge fund finished the year down about 4% and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway dropped 11.5%. The Masters of the Universe – William Ackman, David Einhorn, Joel Greenblatt, and Larry Robbins among them – are all spending their holidays penning letters that explain why 10-25% losses are no big deal. The folks at Bain, Fortress Investments and BlackRock spared themselves the bother by simply closing their hedge funds this year.

And among funds I actually care about (a/k/a “own”), T. Rowe Price Spectrum Income (RPSIX) lost money for just the third time in its 25 year history. As in 1994, it’s posting an annual loss of about 2%.

What to make of it? Opinions differ. Neil Irwin, writing in The New York Times half-celebrated:

Name a financial asset — any financial asset. How did it do in 2015?

The answer, in all likelihood: Meh.

It might have made a little money. It might have lost a little money. But, barring any drastic moves in the final trading days of 2015, the most widely held classes of assets, including stocks and bonds across the globe, were basically flat … While that may be disappointing news for people who hoped to see big returns from at least some portion of their portfolio, it is excellent news for anyone who wants to see a steady global economic expansion without new bubbles and all the volatility that can bring. (“Financial markets were flat in 2015. Thank goodness.” 12/30/2015)

Stephanie Yang, writing for CNBC, half-despaired:

It’s been a really, really tough year for returns.

According to data from Societe Generale, the best-performing asset class of 2015 has been stocks, whose meager 2 percent total return (that is, including dividends) still surpasses those of long-term bonds, short-term Treasury bills and commodities. These minimal gains make 2015 the worst year for finding returns since 1937, when the cash-like 3-month Treasury bill beat out other major asset classes with a return of 0.3 percent. (“2015 was the hardest year to make money in 78 years,” 12/31/2015).

Thirty-one liquid alts funds subsequently liquidated, the most ever (“The Year the Hedge-Fund Model Stalled on Main Street,” WSJ, 12/31/2015).

The most pressing question is whether 2015 is a single bad year or the prelude to something more painful than “more or less flat.” The folks at the Leuthold Group, advisers to the Leuthold funds as well as good institutional researchers, make the argument that the global equity markets have topped out. In support of that position, they break the market out into both component parts (MSCI Emerging Markets or FTSE 100) and internal measures (number of new 52-week highs in the NYSE or the ratio of advancing to declining stocks). With Leuthold’s permission, we’ve reproduced their timeline here.

Two things stand out. First, it appears that “the market’s” gains, if any, are being driven by fewer and fewer stocks. That’s suggested by the fact the number of 52-week highs peaked in 2013 and the number of advancing stocks peaked in spring 2015. The equal-weight version of the S&P 500 (represented by the Guggenheim S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF RSP) trailed the cap-weighted version by 370 basis points. The Value Line Arithmetic Index, which tracks the performance of “the average stock” by equally weighting 1675 issues, is down 11% from its April peak. Nearly 300 of the S&P 500 stocks will likely finish the year in the red. Second, many of the components followed the same pattern: peak in June, crash in August, partially rally in September then fade. The battle cry “there’s always a bull market somewhere!” seems not to be playing out just now.

The S&P 500 began 2015 at 2058. The consensus of market strategists in Barron’s was that it would finish 2015 just north of 2200. It actually ended at 2043. The new consensus is that it will finish 2016 just north of 2200.

The Leuthold Group calculates that, if we were to experience a typical bear market over the next year, the S&P 500 would drop to somewhere between 1500-1600.

By most measures, US stocks remain overpriced. There’s not much margin for safety in the bond market right now with US interest rates near zero and other major developing markets cutting theirs. Those interest rate cuts reflect concerns about weak growth and the potential for a China-led recession. The implosion of Third Avenue Focused Credit (TFCVX) serves as a reminder that liquidity challenges remain unresolved ahead of potentially disruptive regulations contemplated by the SEC.

The path forward is not particularly clear to me because we’ve never managed such a long period of global economic weakness and zero to negative interest rates before. My plan is to remind myself that I need to care about 2026 more than about 2016, to rebalance soon, and to stick with my discipline which is, roughly put, “invest regularly and automatically in sensible funds that execute a reasonable plan, ignore the market and pay attention to the moments, hours and days that life presents me.” On whole, an hour goofing around with my son or the laughter of dinner guests really does make a much bigger difference in my life than anything my portfolio might do today.

As Sergeant Phil Esterhaus used to remind the guys at Hill Street station as they were preparing to leave on patrol, “Hey, let’s be careful out there.”

For those seeking rather more direct guidance, our colleague Leigh Walzer of Trapezoid offers guidance, below, on the discipline of finding all-weather managers. Helpfully enough, he names a couple for you.

Good-Bye to All That

I cribbed the title from Robert Graves’ 1929 autobiography, one of a host of works detailing the horrors of fighting the Great War and the British military’s almost-criminal incompetence.

We bid farewell, sometimes with sadness, to a host of friends and funds.

Farewell to the Whitebox Funds

The Whitebox Advisors come from The Land of Giants. From the outside, I could never tell whether their expression was “swagger” or “sneer” but I found neither attractive. Back in 2012 readers urged us to look into the funds, and so we did. Our first take was this:

There are some funds, and some management teams, that I find immediately compelling.  Others not.

So far, this is a “not.”

Here’s the argument in favor of Whitebox: they have a Multi-Strategy hedge fund which uses some of the same strategies and which, per a vaguely fawning article in Barron’s, returned 15% annually over the past decade while the S&P returned 5%. I’ll note that the hedge fund’s record does not get reported in the mutual fund’s, which the SEC allows when it believes that the mutual fund replicates the hedge. 

Here’s the reservation: their writing makes them sound arrogant and obscure.  They advertise “a proprietary, multi-factor quantitative model to identify dislocations within and between equity and credit markets.”  At base, they’re looking for irrational price drops.  They also use broad investment themes (they like US blue chips, large cap financials and natural gas producers), are short both the Russell 2000 (which is up 14.2% through 9/28) and individual small cap stocks, and declare that “the dominant theories about how markets behave and the sources of investment success are untrue.”  They don’t believe in the efficient market hypothesis (join the club).

I’ll try to learn more in the month ahead, but I’ll first need to overcome a vague distaste.

I failed to overcome it. The fact that their own managers largely avoided the funds did not engender confidence.

In the face of poor performance and shrinking assets, they announced the closure of their three liquid alts funds in December. My colleague Charles offers a bit of further reflection on the closure, below.

Farewell to The House of Whitman

Marty Whitman become a fund manager at age 60 and earned enormous respect for his outspokenness and fiercely independent style. Returns at Third Avenue Value Fund (TAVFX) were sometimes great, sometimes awful but always Marty. Somewhere along the way, he elevated David Barse to handle all the business stuff that he had no earthly interest in, got bought by AMG, promised to assemble at least $25 billion in assets and built a set of funds that, save perhaps Third Avenue Real Estate Value (TAREX), never quite matched the original. It’s likely that his ability to judge people, or perhaps the attention he was willing to give to judging them, matched his securities analysis. The firm suffered and Mr. Whitman, in his 80s, either drifted or was pushed aside. Last February we wrote:

In sum, the firm’s five mutual funds are down by $11 billion from their peak asset levels and nearly 50% of the investment professionals on staff five years ago, including the managers of four funds, are gone. At the same time, only one of the five funds has had performance that meets the firm’s long-held standards of excellence.

Many outsiders noted not just the departure of long-tenured members of the Third Avenue community, but also the tendency to replace some those folks with outsiders … Industry professionals we talked with spoke of “a rolling coup,” the intentional marginalization of Mr. Whitman within the firm he created and the influx of outsiders. Understandably, the folks at Third Avenue reject that characterization.

Mr. Barse was, reportedly, furious about our story. An outstanding bit of reporting by Gregory Zuckerman and Matt Wirz from The Wall Street Journal in the wake of the collapse of Third Avenue Focused Credit revealed that “furious” was a more-or-less constant state for him.

Mr. Barse also harangued other fund managers who grew disgruntled. Mr. Whitman took no public steps to rein in the CEO, the people said, preferring to focus on investing.

The dispute boiled over in the fall of 2011, when about 50 employees gathered in the firm’s largest conference room after an annual meeting with investors. Mr. Barse screamed at Mr. Whitman, inches from his face, demanding better performance, according to people who were in the room.

Mr. Whitman “was pounding the table so hard with his fist it was shaking,” said another person at the meeting. Mr. Whitman eventually withdrew money from the Value Fund and quit running it to focus on investing for himself, while remaining chairman of the firm.

As most of Third Avenue’s funds underperformed relevant benchmarks … Mr. Barse seemed to become more irritated, the people said.

Staff stopped using the conference room adjoining Mr. Barse’s office because sometimes he could be heard shouting through the walls.

Most employees received part of their pay on a deferred basis. After 2008, Mr. Barse began personally determining compensation for most personnel, often without explaining his decision, one of the people said. (“How the Third Avenue Fund Melted Down,” 12/23/2015).

Yikes. The Focused Credit fund, Mr. Barse’s brainchild, came into the summer of 2015 with something like one third of its assets invested in illiquid securities, so-called “Level 3 securities.” There are two things you need to know about illiquid securities: you probably can’t sell them (at least not easily or quickly) and you probably can’t know what they’re actually worth (which is defined as “what someone is willing to buy it for”). A well-documented panic ensued when it looked like Focused Credit would need to hurriedly sell securities for which there were no buyers. Mr. Barse ordered the fund’s assets moved to a “liquidating trust,” which meant that shareholders (a) no longer knew what their accounts were worth and (b) no longer could get to the money. The plan, Third Avenue writes, is to liquidate the illiquid securities whenever they find someone willing to pay a decent price for them. Investors will receive dribs and drabs as that process unfolds.

We wrote Third Avenue to ask whether the firm would honor the last-published NAV for their fund and whether the firm had a commitment to “making whole” their investors. Like The Wall Street Journal reporters, we found that folks were unwilling to talk.

And so now investors wait. How long might they wait? Oh, could be eight or ten years. The closest analogue we have is the 2006 blowup of the Amaranth Advisors hedge fund. Amaranth announced that they’d freeze redemptions for two months. That’s now stretched to ten years with the freeze extended until at least December 2016. (“Ten Years After Blowup, Amaranth Investors Waiting to Get Money Back,” WSJ, 12/30/2015). In the interim, it’s hard to understand why investment advisors wouldn’t follow Mr. Whitman out the door.

Farewell to Mainstay Marketfield

Marketfield (MFLDX) was an excellent small no-load liquid alts fund that aspired to be more. It aspired to be a massive liquid alts fund, a goal achieved by selling themselves to New York Life and becoming Mainstay Marketfield. New York Life adopted a $1.7 billion overachiever in 2012 and managed to jam another $20 billion in assets into the fund in two years. The fund hasn’t been the same since. Over the past three years, it’s earned a one-star rating from Morningstar and lost almost 90% of its assets while trailing 90% of its peers.

On December 15, 2015, Mainstay announced an impending divorce:

At a meeting held on December 8-10, 2015, the Board of Trustees of MainStay Funds Trust approved an Agreement and Plan of Reorganization [which] provides for the reorganization of the Fund into the Marketfield Fund (the “New Fund”) …

Prior to the Reorganization, which is expected to occur on or about March 23, 2016, Marketfield Asset Management, LLC, the Fund’s current subadvisor, will continue to manage the Fund … The New Fund will have the same investment objective, principal investment strategies and investment process.

There are very few instances of a fund recovering from such a dramatic fall, but we wish Mr. Aronstein and his remaining investors the very best.

Farewell to Sequoia’s mystique

The fact that Sequoia (SEQUX) lost money in 2015 should bother no one. The fact that they lost their independence should bother anyone who cares about the industry. Sequoia staked its fate to the performance of Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a firm adored by hedge fund managers and Sequoia – which plowed over a third of its portfolio into the stock – for its singular strategy: buy small drug companies with successful niche medicines, then skyrocket the price of those drugs. One recent story reported:

The drugstore price of a tube of Targretin gel, a topical treatment for cutaneous T cell lymphoma, rose to about $30,320 this year from $1,687 in 2009. Most of that increase appears to have occurred after Valeant acquired the drug early in 2013. A patient might need two tubes a month for several months, Dr. Rosenberg said.

The retail price of a tube of Carac cream, used to treat precancerous skin lesions called actinic keratoses, rose to $2,865 this summer from $159 in 2009. Virtually all of the increase occurred after 2011, when Valeant acquired the product. (“Two Valeant drugs lead steep price increases,” 11/25/2015)

Remember that Valeant didn’t do anything to discover or create the drugs; they simply gain control of them and increase the price by 1800%.

Sequoia’s relationship to Valeant’s CEO struck me as deeply troubling: Valeant’s CEO Michael Pearson was consistently “Mike” when Sequoia talked about him, as in “my buddy Mike.”

We met with Mike a few weeks ago and he was telling us how with $300 million, you can get an awful lot done.

Mike can get a lot done with very little.

Mike is making a big bet.

The Sequoia press releases about Valeant sound like they were written by Valeant, two members of the board of trustees resigned in protest, a third was close to following them and James Stewart, writing for The New York Times, described “Sequoia’s infatuation with Valeant.” In a desperate gesture, Sequoia’s David Poppe tried to analogize Sequoia’s investment in Valeant with a long-ago bet on Berkshire Hathaway. Mr. Stewart drips acid on the argument.

Sequoia’s returns may well rebound. Their legendary reputation, built over decades of principled decision-making, will not. Our November story on Sequoia ended this way:

Sequoia’s recent shareholder letter concludes by advising Valeant to start managing with “an eye on the company’s long-term corporate reputation.” It’s advice that we’d urge upon Sequoia’s managers as well.

Farewell to Irving Kahn

Mr. Kahn died at his home in February 2015. At age 109, he was the nation’s oldest active professional investor. He began trading in the summer of 1929, made good money by shorting overvalued stock at the outset of the Crash, and continued working steadily for 85 more years. He apprenticed with Benjamin Graham and taught, at Graham’s behest, at the Columbia Business School. At 108, he still traveled to his office three days a week, weather permitted. His firm, Kahn Brothers Group, manages over a billion dollars.

Where Are the Jedi When You Need Them?

“In present-day America it’s very difficult, when commenting on events of the day, to invent something so bizarre that it might not actually come to pass while your piece is still on the presses.”

Calvin Trillin, remarking on the problems in writing satire today.

So, the year has ended and again there is no joy in Mudville. The investors have no yachts or NetJet cards but on a trailing fee basis, fund managers still got rich. The S&P 500, which by the way has 30-35% of the earnings of its component companies coming from overseas so it is internationally diversified, trounced most active managers again. We continued to see the acceleration of the generational shift at investment management companies, not necessarily having anything to do with the older generation becoming unfit or incompetent. After all, Warren Buffett is in his 80’s, Charlie Munger is even older, and Roy Neuberger kept working, I believe, well into his 90’s. No, most such changes have to do with appearances and marketing. The buzzword of the day is “succession planning.” In the investment management business, old is generally defined as 55 (at least in Boston at the two largest fund management firms in that town). But at least it is not Hollywood.

One manager I know who cut his teeth as a media analyst allegedly tried to secure a place as a contestant on “The Bachelor” through his industry contacts. Alas, he was told that at age 40 he was too old. Probably the best advice I had in this regard was a discussion with a senior infantry commander, who explained to me that at 22, a man (or woman) was probably too old to be in the front lines in battle. They no longer believed they couldn’t be killed. The same applies to investment management, where the younger folks, especially when dealing with other people’s money, think that this time the “new, new thing” really is new and this time it really is different. That is a little bit of what we have seen in the energy and commodity sectors this year, as people kept doubling down and buying on the dips. This is not to say that I am without sin in this regard myself, but at a certain point, experience does cause one to stand back and reassess. Those looking for further insight, I would advise doing a search on the word “Passchendaele.” Continuing to double down on investments especially where the profit of the underlying business is tied to the price of a commodity has often proved to be a fool’s errand.

The period between Christmas and New Year’s Day is when I usually try to catch up on seeing movies. If you go to the first showing in the morning, you get both the discounted price and, a theater that is usually pretty empty. This year, we saw two movies. I highly recommend both of them. One of them was “The Big Short” based on the book by Michael Lewis. The other was “Spotlight” which was about The Boston Globe’s breaking of the scandal involving abusive priests in the Archdiocese of Boston.

Now, I suspect many of you will see “The Big Short” and think it is hyped-up entertainment. That of course, the real estate bubble with massive fraud taking place in the underwriting and placement of mortgages happened in 2006-2008 but ….. Yes, it happened. And a very small group of people, as you will see in the story, saw it, thought something did not make sense, asked questions, researched, and made a great deal of money going against the conventional wisdom. They did not just avoid the area (don’t invest in thrifts or banks, don’t invest in home building stocks, don’t invest in mortgage guaranty insurers) but found vehicles to invest in that would go up as the housing market bubble burst and the mortgages became worthless. I wish I could tell you I was likewise as smart to have made those contrary investments. I wasn’t. However, I did know something was wrong, based on my days at a bank and on its asset-liability committee. When mortgages stopped being retained on the books by the institutions that had made them and were packaged to be sold into the secondary market (and then securitized), it was clear that, without ongoing accountability, underwriting standards were being stretched. Why? With gain-on-sale accounting, profits and bonuses were increased and stock options went into the money. That was one of the reasons I refused to drink the thrift/bank Kool-Aid (not the only time I did not go along to get along, but we really don’t change after the age of 8). One food for thought question – are we seeing a replay event in China, tied as their boom was to residential construction and real estate?

One of the great scenes in “The Big Short” is when two individuals from New York fly down to Florida to check on the housing market and find unfinished construction, mortgages on homes being occupied by renters, people owning four or five homes trying to flip them, and totally bogus underwriting on mortgage lending. The point here is that they did the research – they went and looked. Often in fund management, a lot of people did not do that. After all, fill-in-the blank sell-side firm would not be recommending purchase of equities in home builders or mortgage lenders, without actually doing the real due diligence. Leaving aside the question of conflicts of interest, it was not that difficult to go look at the underlying properties and check valuations out against the deeds in the Recorder’s Office (there is a reason why there are tax stamps on deeds). So you might miss a few of your kid’s Little League games. But what resonates most with me is that no senior executive that I can remember from any of the big investment banks, the big thrifts, the big commercial banks was criminally charged and went to jail. Instead, what seems to have worked is what I will call the “good German defense.” And another aside, in China, there is still capital punishment and what are capital crimes is defined differently than here.

This brings me to “Spotlight” where one of the great lines is, “We all knew something was going on and we didn’t do anything about it.” And the reason it resonates with me is that you see a similar conspiracy of silence in the financial services industry. Does the investor come first or the consultant? Is it most important that the assets grow so the parent company gets a bigger return on its investment, or is investment performance most important? John Bogle, when he has spoken about conflicts of interest, is right when he talks about the many conflicts that came about when investment firms were allowed to sell themselves and basically eliminate personal responsibility.

This year, we have seen the poster child for what is wrong with this business with the ongoing mess at The Third Avenue Funds. There is a lot that has been written so far. I expect more will be written (and maybe even some litigation to boot). I commend all of you to the extensive pieces that have appeared in the Wall Street Journal. But what they highlight that I don’t think has been paid enough attention to is the problem of a roll-up investment (one company buying up and owning multiple investment management firms) with absentee masters. In the case of Third Avenue, we have Affiliated Managers Group owning, as reported by the WSJ, 60% of Third Avenue, and those at Third Avenue keeping a 40% stake (to incentivize them). With other companies from Europe, such as Allianz, the percentages may change but the ownership is always majority. So, 60% of the revenues come off the top, and the locals are left to grow the business, reinvest in it by hiring and retaining talent, focus on investment performance, etc., with their percentage. Unfortunately, when the Emperor is several states, or an ocean away, one often does not know what is really going on. You get to see numbers, you get told what you want to hear (ISIS has been contained, Bill Gross is a distraction to the other people), and you accept it until something stops working.

So I leave you with my question for you all to ponder for 2016. Is the 1940 Act mutual fund industry, the next big short? Investors, compliments of Third Avenue, have now been reminded that daily liquidity and redemption is that until it is not. As I have mentioned before, this is an investment class with an unlimited duration and a mismatch of assets and liabilities. This is perhaps an unusual concern for a publication named “Mutual Fund Observer.” But I figure if nothing else, we can always start a separate publication called “Mutual Fund Managers Address Book” so you can go look at the mansions and townhouses in person.

– by Edward A. Studzinski

Quietly successful: PYGSX, RSAFX, SCLDX, ZEOIX

Amidst the turmoil, a handful of the funds we’re profiled did in 2015 exactly what they promised. They made a bit of money with little drama and, sadly, little attention. You might want to glance in their direction if you’ve found that your managers were getting a little too creative and stretching a little too far in their pursuit of “safe” income.

Payden Global Low Duration (PYGSX): the short-term global bond fund made a modest 0.29% in 2015 while its peers lost about 4.6%. In our 2013 profile we suggested that “flexibility and opportunism coupled with experienced, disciplined management teams will be invaluable” and that Payden offered that combo.

Riverpark Structural Alpha (RSAFX): this tiny fund used a mix of options which earned their investors 1.3% while its “market neutral” peers lost money. The fund, we suggested, was designed to answer the question, “where should investors who are horrified by the prospects of the bond market but are already sufficiently exposed to the stock market turn for stable, credible returns?” It’s structurally exposed to short-term losses but also structurally designed to rebound, automatically and quickly, from them. In the last five years, for example, it’s had four losing quarters but has never had back-to-back losing quarters.

Scout Low Duration Bond Fund (SCLDX): this flexible, tiny short-term bond tiny fund made a bit of money in 2015 (0.6%), but it’s more impressive that the underlying strategy also made money (1.4%) during the 2008 meltdown. Mr. Eagan, the lead manager, explained it this way: “Many short-term bond funds experienced negative returns in 2008 because they were willing to take on what we view as unacceptable risks in the quest for incremental yield or income …When the credit crisis occurred, the higher risks they were willing to accept produced significant losses, including permanent impairment. We believe that true risk in fixed income should be defined as a permanent loss of principle. Focusing on securities that are designed to avoid this type of risk has served us well through the years.”

Zeo Strategic Income (ZEOIX): this short-term, mostly high-yield fund made 2.0% in 2015 while its peers dropped 4.1%. It did a particularly nice job in the third quarter, making a marginal gain as the high-yield market tanked. Positioned as a home for your “strategic cash holdings,” we suggested that “Modestly affluent folks who are looking to both finish ahead of inflation and sleep at night should likely make the effort to reach out and learn more.”

RiverPark Short-Term High Yield (RPHYX) likewise posted a gain – 0.86% – for the year but remains closed to new investors. PIMCO Short Asset Investment (PAIUX) which provides the “cash” strategy for all the PIMCO funds, eked out a 0.25% gain, modestly ahead of its ultra-short peers. 

These are very different strategies, but are unified by the presence of thoughtful, experienced managers who are exceedingly conscious of market risk.

Candidates for Rookie of the Year

We’ve often asked, by journalists and others, which are the young funds to keep an eye on. We decided to search our database for young funds that have been exceptionally risk-sensitive and have, at the same time, posted strong returns over their short lives. We used our premium screener to identify funds that had several characteristics:

They were between 12 and 24 months old; that is, they’d completed at least one full year of existence but were no more than two. I suspect a few funds in the 2-3 year range slipped through, but it should be pretty few.

They had a Martin Ratio greater than one; the Martin Ratio is a variation of the Sharpe ratio which is more sensitive to downward movements

They had a positive Sharpe ratio and had one of the five highest Sharpe ratios in their peer group.

Hence: young, exceptional downside sensitivity so far and solid upside. We limited our search to a dozen core equity categories, such as Moderate Balanced and Large Growth.

In all of these tables, “APR vs Peer” measures the difference in Annual Percentage Return between a fund’s lifetime performance and its average peers. A fund might have a 14 month record which the screener annualizes; that is, it says “at this rate, you’d expect to earn X in a year.” That’s important because a fund with a scant 12 month record is going to look a lot worse than one at 20 or 24 months since 2015, well, sucked.

Herewith, the 2016 Rookie of the Year nominees:

Small cap rookies	Sharpe Ratio	Martin Ratio	APR vs Peer
Acuitas US Microcap (AFMCX)	0.83	3.10	9.6	Three sets of decent sub-advisors, tiny market cap but the fund is institutional only.
Hodges Small Intrinsic Value (HDSVX)	0.79	2.37	9.3	Same team that manages the five-star Hodges Small Cap fund.
Perritt Low Priced Stock (PLOWX)	0.74	2.05	8.8	The same manager runs Perritt UltraMicro and Microcap Opportunities, neither of which currently look swift when benchmarked against funds that invest in vastly larger stocks.
Hancock Horizon US Small Cap (HSCIX)	0.70	2.61	8.6	Hmmm… the managers also run, with limited distinction, Hancock Horizon Growth, a large cap fund.
SunAmerica Small-Cap (SASAX)	0.70	2.51	8.1	Some overlap with the management team for AMG Managers Cadence Emerging Companies, a really solid little institutional fund.

 

Mid cap rookies	Sharpe Ratio	Martin Ratio	APR vs Peer
PowerShares S&P MidCap Low Volatility Portfolio (XMLV)	0.99	4.11	10.4	Low vol. Good thought.
Diamond Hill Mid Cap (DHPAX)	0.75	3.22	7.9	In various configurations, members of the team are responsible for six other Diamond Hill funds, some very fine.
Nuance Mid Cap Value (NMAVX)	0.45	2.03	6.7	Two years old; kinda clubbed its competition in 2015. The lead manager handled $10 billion as an American Century manager.
Hodges Small-to-Midcap (HDSMX)	0.43	1.32	5.5	Same team that manages the five-star Hodges Small Cap fund.
Barrow Value Opportunity (BALAX)	0.41	1.58	5.3	David Bechtel talked through the fund’s strategy in a 2014 Elevator Talk.

 

Large cap rookies	Sharpe Ratio	Martin Ratio	APR vs Peer
iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF (MTUM)	0.64	2.68	3.6	Momentum tends to dominate at the ends of bull markets, so this isn’t particularly surprising.
iShares MSCI USA Quality Factor ETF (QUAL)	0.53	2.61	2.5
Arin Large Cap Theta (AVOLX)	0.52	2.73	4.5	A covered call fund that both M* and Lipper track as if it were simple large cap equity.
SPDR MFS Systematic Core Equity ETF (SYE)	0.48	1.99	6	An active ETF managed by MFS
SPDR MFS Systematic Value Equity ETF (SYV)	0.46	1.8	8.0	And another.

Hmmm … you might notice that the large cap list is dominated by ETFs, two active and two passive. There were a larger number of active funds on the original list but I deleted Fidelity funds (three of them) that were only available for use by other Fidelity managers.

Multi-cap rookies	Sharpe Ratio	Martin Ratio	APR vs Peer
SPDR MFS Systematic Growth Equity ETF (SYG)	0.74	3.3	10.4	Another active ETF managed by MFS
Segall Bryant & Hamill All Cap (SBHAX)	0.69	2.73	5.4	The lead manager used to run a Munder health care fund. M* treats this as a large growth fund, a category in which it does not excel.
Riverbridge Growth (RIVRX)	0.66	2.43	4.6	The team has been subadvising a Dreyfus Select Managers small cap fund for about five years.
AT Mid Cap Equity (AWMIX)	0.52	1.74	3.5	AT is Atlantic Trust, once known for the Atlantic Whitehall funds. It’s currently limiting itself to rich folks. Pity.
BRC Large Cap Focus Equity (BRCIX)	0.37	1.31	5.3	Institutional only. Pity.

This is another category where we had to dump a bunch of internal-only Fidelity funds. It’s interesting that no passive fund was even near the top of the list, perhaps because the ability to move between size ranges is active and useful?

Global rookies	Sharpe Ratio	Martin Ratio	APR vs Peer
William Blair Global Small Cap Growth (WGLIX)	0.99	3.99	11.9	Sibling to an excellent but closed international small growth fund. They’re liquidating it anyway (Thanks for the reminder, JoJo).
Vanguard Global Minimum Volatility (VMVFX)	0.96	3.96	9.4	A fund we profiled.
WCM Focused Global Growth (WFGGX)	0.81	3.48	11.2	The team runs eight funds, mostly as sub-advisors, including the five star Focused International Growth fund.
QS Batterymarch Global Dividend (LGDAX)	0.3	1.16	8.1
Scharf Global Opportunity (WRLDX)	0.3	1.14	4.1	0.50% e.r. The same manager runs four or five Scharf funds, several with exceptional track records.

At the other end of the spectrum, it was durn tough to find strong performance among “rookie” international funds. In the emerging markets arena, for example, just one fund had a positive Martin Ratio: Brown Advisory Emerging Markets Small-Cap (BIANX). Everyone else was down a deep, deep hole.

While we’re not endorsing any of these funds just yet, they’ve distinguished themselves with creditable starts in tough markets. In the months ahead, we’ll be trying to learn more about them on your behalf.

For the convenience of MFO Premium members who are interesting in digging into rookie funds more deeply, Charles created a preset screen for high-achieving younger funds. He offers dozens of data points on each of those funds where we only have room, or need, for a handful here.

Premium Site Update

New to MFO Premium this month are several additions to the MultiSearch Tool, which now can screen our monthly fund database with some 44 performance metrics and other parameters. (Here are links to current Input and Output MultiSearch Parameter Lists.) The new additions include SubType (a kind of super category), exchange-traded fund (ETF) flag, Profiled Funds flag, and some initial Pre-Set Screens.

SubType is a broad grouping of categories. Lipper currently defines 144 categories, excluding money market funds. MFO organizes them into 9 subtypes: U.S. Equity, Mixed Asset, Global Equity, International Equity, Sector Equity, Commodity, Alternative & Other, Bond, and Municipal Bond funds. The categories are organized further into broader types: Fixed Income, Asset Allocation, and Equity funds. The MultiSearch Tool enables screening of up to 9 categories, 3 subtypes, or 2 types along with other criteria.

The Profiled Funds flag enables screening of funds summarized monthly on our Dashboard (screenshot here). Each month, David (and occasionally another member of MFO’s staff), typically provides in-depth analysis of two to four funds, continuing a FundAlarm tradition. Through November 2015, 117 profiles are available on MFO legacy site Funds page. “David’s Take” precariously attempts to distill the profile into one word: Positive, Negative, or Mixed.

The ETF flag is self-explanatory, of course. How many ETFs are in our November database? A lot! 1,716 of the 9,034 unique (aka oldest share class) funds we cover are ETFs, or nearly 19%. The most populated ETF subtype is Sector Equity with 364, followed by International Equity with 343, US Equity with 279, and Bonds with 264. At nearly $2T in assets under management (AUM), ETFs represent 12% of the market. Our screener shows 226 ETFs with more than $1B in AUM. Here is a summary of 3-year performance for top ten ETFs by AUM (click on image to enlarge):

The Pre-Set Screen option is simply a collection of screening criteria. The two initial screens are “Best Performing Rookie Funds” and “Both Great Owl and Honor Roll Funds.” The former generates a list of 160 funds that are between the age of 1 and 2 years old and have delivered top quintile risk adjusted return (based on Martin Ratio) since their inception. The latter generates a list of 132 funds that have received both our Great Owl distinction as well as Honor Roll designation. Here is a summary of 3-year performance for top ten such funds, again by AUM (click on image to enlarge) … it’s an impressive list:

Other Pre-Screens David has recommended include “moderate allocation funds with the best Ulcer Index, small caps with the shortest recovery times, fixed-income funds with the smallest MAXDD …” Stay tuned.

Along with the parameters above, new options were added to existing criteria in the MultiSearch Tool. These include 30, 40, and 50 year Age groups; a “Not Three Alarm” rating; and, a “0% Annual or More” Absolute Return setting.

Using the new “0% Annual or More” criterion, we can get a sense of how tough the past 12 months have been for mutual funds. Of the 8,450 funds across all categories at least 12 months old through November 2015, nearly 60% (4,835) returned less than 0% for the year. Only 36 of 147 moderate allocation funds delivered a positive return, which means nearly 75% lost money … believe it or not, this performance was worse than the long/short category.

A closer look at the long/short category shows 56 of 121 funds delivered positive absolute return. Of those, here are the top five based on risk adjusted return (Martin Ratio) … click on image to enlarge:

AQR Long/Short

AQR’s rookie Long/Short Equity I (QLEIX) has been eye-watering since inception, as can be seen in its Risk Profile (click on images to enlarge):

While I’ve always been a fan of Cliff Asness and the strategies at AQR, I’m not a fan of AQR Funds, since experiencing unfriendly shareholder practices, namely lack of disclosure when its funds underperform … but nothing speaks like performance.

Whitebox Funds

I have also always been a fan of Andrew Redleaf and Whitebox Funds, which we featured in the March 2015 Whitebox Tactical Opportunities 4Q14 Conference Call and October 2013 Whitebox Tactical Opportunities Conference Call. David has remained a bit more guarded, giving them a “Mixed” profile in April 2013 Whitebox Market Neutral Equity Fund, Investor Class (WBLSX), April 2013.

This past month the Minneapolis-based shop decided to close its three open-end funds, which were based on its hedge-fund strategies, less than four years after launch. A person familiar with the adviser offered: “They were one large redemption away from exposing remaining investors to too great a concentration risk … so, the board voted to close the funds.” AUM in WBMIX had grown to nearly $1B, before heading south. According to the same person, Whitebox hedge funds actually attracted $2B additional AUM the past two years and that was where they wanted to concentrate their efforts.

The fund enjoyed 28 months (about as long as QLEIX is old) of strong performance initially, before exiting the Mr. Market bus. Through November 2015, it’s incurred 19 consecutive months of drawdown and a decline from its peak of 24.2%. Depicting its rise and fall, here is a Morningstar growth performance plot of WBMIX versus Vanguard’s Balanced Fund Index (VBINX), as well as the MFO Risk Profile (click on images to enlarge):

Ultimately, Mr. Redleaf and company failed to deliver returns across the rather short life span of WBMIX consistent with their goal of “the best endowments.” Ultimately, they also failed to deliver performance consistent with the risk tolerance and investment timeframe of its investors. Ultimately and unfortunately, there was no “path to victory” in the current market environment for the fund’s “intelligent value” strategy, as compelling as it sounded and well-intended as it may have been.

As always, a good discussion can be found on the MFO Board Whitebox Mutual Funds Liquidating Three Funds, along with news of the liquidations.

Year-end MFO ratings will be available on or about 4th business day, which would be January 7^th on both our premium and legacy sites.

Snow Tires and All-Weather portfolios

By Leigh Walzer

Readers of a certain age will remember when winter meant putting on the snow tires. All-season tires were introduced in 1978 and today account for 96% of the US market. Not everyone is sure this is a good idea; Edmunds.com concludes “snow and summer tires provide clear benefits to those who can use them.”

As we begin 2016, most of the country is getting its first taste of winter weather. “Putting on the snow tires” is a useful metaphor for investors who are considering sacrificing performance for safety. Growth stocks have had a great run while the rest of the market sits stagnant. Fed-tightening, jittery credit markets, tight-fisted consumer, commodity recession, and sluggishness outside the US are good reasons for investor caution.

Some clients have been asking if now is a good time to dial back allocations to growth. In other words, should they put the snow tires on their portfolio.

The dichotomy between growth and value and the debate over which is better sometimes approaches theological overtones. Some asset allocators are convinced one or the other will outperform over the long haul. Others believe each has a time and season. There is money to be made switching between growth and value, if only we had 20/20 hindsight about when the business cycle turns.

When has growth worked better than value?

Historically, the race between growth and value has been nearly a dead heat. Exhibit 1 shows the difference in the Cumulative return of Growth and Value strategies over the past twenty years. G/V is a measure of the difference in return between growth and value in a given period Generally speaking, growth performed better in the 90s, a period of loose money up to the internet bust. Value did better from 2000-2007. Since 2007, growth has had the edge despite a number of inflections. Studies going back 50 years suggest value holds a slight advantage, particularly during the stagflation of the 1970s.

Exhibit I

Growth tends to perform better in up-markets. This relationship is statistically valid but the magnitude is almost negligible. Over the past twenty years Trapezoid’s US Growth Index had a beta of 1.015 compared with 0.983 for Value.

Exhibit II

The conventional wisdom is that growth stocks should perform better early to mid-cycle while value stocks perform best late in the business cycle and during recession. That might loosely describe the 90s and early 2000s. However, in the run up the great recession, value took a bigger beating as financials melted down. And when the market rebounded in April 2009, value led the recovery for the first six months.

Value investors expect to sacrifice some upside capture in order to preserve capital during declining markets. Exhibit III, which uses data from Morningstar.com about their Large Growth (“LG”) and Large Value (“LV”) fund categories, shows the reality is less clear. In 2000-2005 LV lived up to its promise: it captured 96% of LG’s upside but only 63% of its downside. But since 2005 LV has actually participated more in the downside than LG.

Exhibit III	2001-2005	2006-2010	2011- 2015
LG Upside Capture	105%	104%	98%
LG Downside Capture	130%	101%	106%
LV Upside Capture	101%	99%	94%
LV Downside Capture	82%	101%	111%
LV UC / LG Up Capt	96%	95%	97%
LV DC / LG Dn Capt	63%	100%	104%

Recent trend

In 2015 (with the year almost over as of this writing), value underperformed growth by about 5%. Value funds are overweight energy and underweight consumer discretionary which contributed to the shortfall.

Can growth/value switches be predicted accurately?

In the long haul, the two strategies perform nearly equally. If the weatherman can’t predict the snow, maybe it makes sense to leave the all-season tires on all year.

We can look through the historical Trapezoid database to see which managers had successfully navigated between growth and value. Recall that Trapezoid uses the Orthogonal Attribution Engine to attribute the performance of active equity managers over time to a variety of skills. Trapezoid calculates the contribution to portfolio return from overweighting growth or value in a given period. We call this sV.

Bear in mind that Trapezoid LLC does not call market turns or rate sectors for timeliness. And Trapezoid doesn’t try to forecast whether growth or value will work better in a given period. But we do try to help investors make the most of the market. And we look at the historic and projected ability of money managers to outperform the market and their peer group based on a number of skills.

The Trapezoid data does identify managers who scored high in sV during particular periods. Unfortunately, high sV doesn’t seem to carry over from period to period. As Professor Snowball would say, sV lacks predictive validity; the weatherman who excelled last year missed the big storm this year. However, the data doesn’t rule out the possibility that some managers may have skill. As we have seen, growth or value can dominate for many years, and few managers have sufficient tenure to draw a strong conclusion.

We also checked whether market fundamentals might help investors allocate between growth and value. We are aware of one macroeconomic model (Duke/Fuqua 2002) which claims to successfully anticipate 2/3 of growth and value switches over the preceding 25 years.

One hypothesis is that value excels when valuations are stretched while growth excels when the market is not giving enough credit to earnings growth. In principle this sounds almost tautologically correct. However, implementing an investment strategy is not easy. We devised an index to see how much earnings growth the market is pricing in a given time (S&P500 E/P less 7-year AAA bond yield adjusted for one year of earning growth). When the index is high, it means either the equity market is attractive relative bonds or that the market isn’t pricing in much earnings growth. Conversely, when the index is low it means valuations of growth stocks are stretched and therefore investors should load up on value. We looked at data from 1995-2015 and compared the relative performance of growth and value strategies over the following 12 months. We expected that when the index is high growth would do better.

Exhibit IV

There are clearly times when investors who heeded this strategy would have correctly anticipated investing cycles. We found the index was directionally correct but not statistically significant. Exhibit IV shows the Predictor has been trending lower in 2015 which would suggest that the growth cycle is nearly over.

All-Weather Managers

Since it is hard to tell when value will start working, investors could opt for all-weather managers, i.e. managers with a proven ability to thrive during value and growth periods.

We combed our database for active equity managers who had an sV contribution of at least 1%/year in both the growth era since 1q07 and the value market which preceded it. Our filter excludes a large swath of managers who haven’t been around 9 years. Only six funds passed this screen – an indication that skill at navigating between growth and value is rare. We knocked out four other funds because, using Trapezoid’s standard methodology, projected skill is low or expenses are high. This left just two funds.

Century Shares Trust (CENSX), launched in 1928, is one of the oldest mutual funds in the US. The fund tracks itself against the Russell 1000 Growth Index but does not target a particular sector mix and apply criteria like EV/EBITDA more associated with value. Expenses run 109bps. CENSX’s performance has been strong over the past three years. Their long-term record selecting stocks and sectors is not sufficient for inclusion in the Trapezoid Honor Roll.

Does CENSX merit extra consideration because of the outstanding contribution from rotating between growth and value? Serendipity certainly plays a part. As Exhibit V illustrates, the current managers inherited in 1999 a fund which was restricted by its charter to financials, especially insurance. That weighting was very well-suited to the internet bust and recession which followed. They gradually repositioned the portfolio towards large growth. And he has made a number of astute switches. Notably, he emphasized consumer discretionary and exited energy which has worked extremely well over the past year. We spoke to portfolio manager Kevin Callahan. The fund is managed on a bottom-up fundamentals basis and does not have explicit sector targets. But he currently screens for stocks from the Russell 1000 Growth Index and seem reluctant to stray too far from its sector weightings, so we expect growth/value switching will be much more muted in the future.

The other fund which showed up is Cohen & Steers Global Realty Fund (CSSPX). The entire real estate category had positive sV over the past 15-20 years; real estate (both domestic and global) clobbered the market during the value years, gave some back in the run-up to the financial crisis, and has been a market performer since then.

We are not sure how meaningful it is that CSSPX made this list over some other real estate funds with similar focus and longevity. Investors may be tempted to embrace real estate as an all-weather sector. But over the longer haul real estate has had a more consistent market correlation with beta averaging 0.6 which means it participated equally in up and down markets.

More complete information can be found at www.fundattribution.com. MFO readers can sign up for a free demo. Please click the link from the Model Dashboard (login required) to the All-Weather Portfolio.

The All-Season Portfolio

Since we are not sure that good historic sV predicts future success and managers with a good track record in this area are scarce, investors might take a portfolio approach to all-season investing.

1. Find best of breed managers. Use Trapezoid’s OAE to find managers with high projected skill relative to cost. While the Trapezoid demo rates only Large Blend managers (link to the October issue of MFO), the OAE also identifies outstanding managers with a growth or value orientation.
2. Strike the right balance. Many thoughtful investors believe “value is all you need” and some counsel 100% allocation to growth. Others apply age-based parameters. Based on the portfolio-optimization model I consulted and my dataset, the recommended weighting of growth and value is nearly 50/50. In other words: snow tires on the front, summer tires on the back. (Note this recommendation is for your portfolio, for auto advice please ask a mechanic.) I used 20 years of data; using a longer time frame, value might look better.

Bottom line:

It is hard to predict whether growth or value will outperform in a given year. Demonstrable skill shifting between growth and value is surprisingly scarce. Investors who are content to be passive can just stick to funds which index the entire market. A better strategy is to identify skillful growth and value managers and weight them evenly.

The Alt Perspective: Commentary and news from DailyAlts.

As they say out here in Los Angeles, that’s a wrap. 2015 has come to a close and we begin anew. But before we get too far into 2016, let’s do a quick recap of some of the activity in the liquid alternatives market that occurred over the past year, starting with a performance review.

Performance Review

Let’s start with traditional asset classes for the full year of 2015, where the average mutual fund for all of the major asset classes (per Morningstar) delivered negative performance on the year:

• Large Blend U.S. Equity: -1.06%
• Foreign Equity Large Blend: -1.56%
• Diversified Emerging Markets: -13.83%
• Intermediate Term Bond: -0.35%
• World Bond: -4.09%
• Moderate Allocation: -1.96%

Now a look at the liquid alternative categories, per Morningstar’s classification. As with the traditional asset classes, none of the alternative categories escaped a negative return on the year:

• Long/Short Equity: -2.08%
• Non-Traditional Bonds: -1.84%
• Managed Futures: -1.06%
• Market Neutral: -0.39%
• Multi-Alternative: -2.48%
• Bear Market: -3.16%

And a few non-traditional asset classes, where real estate generated a positive return:

• Commodities: -24.16%
• Multi-Currency: -0.62%
• Real Estate: 2.39%
• Master Limited Partnerships: -35.12%

Overall, a less than impressive year across the board with energy leading the way to the bottom.

Asset Flows

Flows into alternative mutual funds and ETFs remained fairly constant over the year in terms of where the flows were directed, with a total of $20 billion of new assets being allocated to funds in Morningstar’s alternative categories. However, non-traditional bond funds, which are not included in Morningstar’s alternatives categories, saw nearly $10 billion of outflows through November.

While the flows appeared strong, only three categories had net positive flows over the past twelve months: Multi-alternative funds, managed futures funds and volatility based funds. The full picture is below (data source: Morningstar):

This concentration is not good for the industry, but just as we saw a shift from 2014 to 2015 (non-traditional bond funds were the largest asset gatherer in 2014), the flows will likely shift in 2016. I would expect managed futures to continue to see strong inflows, and both long/short equity and commodities could see a turn back to the positive.

Hot Topics

While there have been a slew of year-end fund launches (we will cover those next month), a dominant theme coming into the end of the year was fund closures. While the Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund announced an abrupt closure of its mutual fund due to significant outflows, the concentration of asset flows to alternative funds is causing a variety of managers to liquidate funds. Most recently, the hedge fund firm Whitebox Advisors decided to close three alternative mutual funds, the oldest of which was launched in 2011. This is a concerning trend, but reminds us that performance still rules.

On the research front, we published summaries of three important research papers in December, all three of which have been popular with readers:

• Will Retiring Baby Boomers Continue the Liquid Alts Boom? – Approximately 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day. Where will they invest their nest eggs when they retire? Liquid alternatives can provide a low volatility solution to keeping their wealth.
• Goldman Sachs Outlines the Case for a Multimanager Approach to Alternatives – While individual strategies can top the charts in any one year, mixing multiple strategies and allocating assets across multiple managers can provide more consistent results over time.
• AQR Puts Risk Parity Performance into Perspective – While risk parity strategies have had lackluster performance over the past few years, it doesn’t mean they need to be tossed aside.

If you would like to keep up with all the news from DailyAlts, feel free to sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter.

All the best for 2016! Have a happy, safe and prosperous year.

Elevator Talk: Randy Swan, Swan Defined Risk (SDRAX/SDRIX)

Since the number of funds we can cover in-depth is smaller than the number of funds worthy of in-depth coverage, we have decided to offer one or two managers each month the opportunity to make a 200 word pitch to you. That’s about the number of words a slightly-manic elevator companion could share in a minute and a half. In each case, I’ve promised to offer a quick capsule of the fund and a link back to the fund’s site. Other than that, they’ve got 200 words and precisely as much of your time and attention as you’re willing to share. These aren’t endorsements; they’re opportunities to learn more.

Randy Swan manages SDRAX, which launched at the end of July 2012. He founded Swan Capital Management, which uses this strategy in their separately managed accounts in 1997. Before then, Mr. Swan was a CPA and senior manager for KPMG’s Financial Services Group, primarily working with insurance companies and risk managers. Mr. Swan manages about $27 million in other accounts, including the new Swan Defined Risk Emerging Markets (SDFAX).

“Stocks for the long term” is an attractive claim, give or take two small problems. First, investors live in the short term; their tolerance for pain is somewhere between three days and three years with most sitting toward the shorter end of that range. Second, sharp losses in the short term push the long-term further off; many of the funds that suffered 50% losses in the 2007-09 debacle remain underwater seven years later.

Bright investors know both of those things and try to hedge their portfolios against risk. The questions become (1) what risk do you try to hedge out? and (2) what tools do you choose? The answers include “everything conceivable and several inconceivable risks” and “balanced portfolios” to “expensive, glitch, inexplicably complicated black box schemes.”

Mr. Swan’s answers are (1) the risk of grinding bear markets but not short-term panics and (2) cheap, value-oriented equity exposure and long-dated options. The strategy is, he says, “always invested, always hedged.”

It’s nice to note that the strategy has outperformed both pure equity and balanced strategies, net of fees, since inception. $10,000 invested with Swan in 1997 has now grown to roughly $44,000 while a comparable investment in the S&P500 climbed to $30,300 and a balanced portfolio would have reached $25,000. I’m more struck, though, by the way that Swan generated those returns. The graphic below compares the variability in returns of the S&P and Swan’s strategy over the nearly 19 years he’s run the strategy. Each line represents the performance for one 10-year period (1998-2007, 1999-2008 and so on).

The consistency of Swan’s returns are striking: in his worst 10-year run, he averaged 7.5% annually while the best run generated 9%. The S&P returns are, in contrast, highly variable, unpredictable and lower.

Here are Mr. Swan’s 222 words on why you should add SDRAX to your due-diligence list:

We’ve managed this strategy since 1997 as a way of addressing the risks posed by bear markets. We combine tax-efficient, low-cost exposure to the U.S. stock market with long-dated options that protect against bears rather than corrections. We’re vulnerable to short-term declines like August’s correction but we’ve done a great job protecting against bears. That’s a worthwhile tradeoff since corrections recover in months (August’s losses are pretty much wiped out already) but bears take years.

Most investors try to manage risk with diversification but you can’t diversify market risk away. Instead, we choose to directly attack market risk by including assets that have an inverse correlation to the markets. At the same time, we maintain a stock portfolio that equally weights all nine sectors through the Select SPDR ETFs which we rebalance regularly. In the long-term, all of the research we’ve seen says an equal-weight strategy will outperform a cap-weighted one because it forces you to continually buy undervalued sectors. That strategy underperforms at the end of a bull market when index gains are driven by a handful of momentum-driven stocks, but over full market cycles it pays off.

Our maxim is KISS: keep it simple, stupid. Low-cost market exposure, reliable hedges against bear markets, no market timing, no attempts at individual security selection. It’s a strategy that has worked for us.

The fund lost about 4% in 2015. Over the past three years, the fund has returned 5.25% annually, well below the S&P 500’s 16%. With the fund’s structural commitment to keeping 10% in currently-loathed sectors such as energy, utilities and basic materials, that’s neither surprising nor avoidable.

Swan Defined-Risk has a $2500 minimum initial investment on its “A” shares, which bear a sales load, and $100,000 on its Institutional shares, which do not. Expenses on the “A” shares run a stiff 1.58% on assets of $1.4 billion, rather below average, while the institutional shares are 25 basis points less. Load-waived access to the “A” shares is available through Schwab, Fidelity, NFS, & TD Ameritrade. Pershing will be added soon.

Here’s the fund’s homepage. Morningstar also wrote a reasonably thoughtful article reflecting on the difference in August 2015 performance between Swan and a couple of apparently-comparable funds. A second version of the article features an annoying auto-launch video.

Funds in Registration

There are 14 new no-load funds in the pipeline. Most will be available by late February or early March. While the number is not extraordinarily high, their parentage is. This month saw filings on behalf of American Century (three funds), DoubleLine, T. Rowe Price (three) and Vanguard (two).

The most intriguing registrant, though, is a new fund from Seafarer. Seafarer Overseas Value Fund will invest in an all-cap EM stock portfolio. Beyond the bland announcement that they’ll use a “value” approach (“investing in companies that currently have low or depressed valuations, but which also have the prospect of achieving improved valuations in the future”), there’s little guidance as to what the fund’s will be doing.

The fund will be managed by Paul Espinosa. Mr. Espinosa had 15 years as an EM equity analyst with Legg Mason, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan before joining Seafarer in May, 2014. Seafarer’s interest in moving in the direction of a value fund was signaled in November, with their publication of Mr. Espinosa’s white paper entitled On Value in the Emerging Markets. It notes the oddity that while emerging markets ought to be rife with misvalued securities, only 3% of emerging markets funds appear to espouse any variety of a value investing discipline. That might reflect Andrew Foster’s long-ago observer that emerging markets were mostly value traps, where corporate, legal and regulatory structures didn’t allow value to be unlocked. More recently he’s mused that those circumstances might be changing.

In any case, after a detailed discussion of what value investing might mean in the emerging markets, the paper concludes:

This exploration discovered a large value opportunity set with an aggregate market capitalization of $1.4 trillion, characterized by financial metrics that strongly suggest the pervasive presence of discounts to intrinsic worth.

After examining most possible deterrents, this study found no compelling reason that investors would forgo value investing in the emerging markets. On the contrary, this paper documented a potential universe that was both large and compelling. The fact that such an opportunity set remains largely untapped should make it all the more attractive to disciplined value practitioners.

The initial expense ratio has not yet been set, though Seafarer is evangelical about providing their services at the lowest practicable cost to investors, and the minimum initial investment is $2,500.

Manager Changes

Fifty-six funds saw partial or complete turnover in their management teams in the past month. Most of the changes seemed pretty modest though, in one case, a firm’s president and cofounder either walked out, or was shown, the door. Curious.

Updates

Back in May, John Waggoner took a buyout offer from USA Today after 25 years as their mutual funds guru. Good news: he’s returning to join InvestmentNews as a senior contributor and mutual funds specialist. Welcome back, big guy!

Briefly Noted . . .

At a Board meeting held on December 11, 2015, RiskX Investments, LLC (formerly American Independence Financial Services, LLC), the adviser to the RX Dynamic Stock Fund (IFCSX formerly, the American Independence Stock Fund), recommended to the Trustees of the Board that the Fund change its investment strategy from value to growth. On whole, that seems like a big honkin’ shift if you were serious about value in the first place but they weren’t: the fund’s portfolio – which typically has a turnover over 200% a year – shifted from core to value to core to value to growth over five consecutive years. That’s dynamic!

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

“The closure of the 361 Managed Futures Strategy Fund (AMFQX) to investment by new investors that was disclosed by the Fund in Supplements dated September 9, 2015, and September 30, 2015, has been cancelled.” Well, okay then!

On December 31^st, Champlain Emerging Markets Fund (CIPDX) announced that it was lowering its expense ratio from 1.85% to 1.60%. With middle-of-the-road performance and just $2 million in assets, it’s worth trying.

It appears that AMG Frontier Small Cap Growth Fund (MSSGX) and AMG TimesSquare Mid Cap Growth Fund (TMDIX) reopened to new investors on January 1. Their filings didn’t say that they reopening; they said, instead, that “With respect to the sub-section ‘Buying and Selling Fund Shares’ in the section ‘Summary of the Funds’ for the Fund, the first paragraph is hereby deleted in its entirety.” The first paragraph explained that the funds were soft-closed.

Effective January 1, ASTON/Cornerstone Large Cap Value Fund (RVALX) will reduce its expense ratio from 1.30% to 1.14% on its retail shares. Institutional shares will see a comparable drop.

Effective as of February 1, 2016, the Columbia Acorn Emerging Markets Fund (CAGAX) and Columbia Small Cap Growth Fund (CGOAX) will be opened to new investors and new accounts.

Effective January 1, 2016, Diamond Hill reduced its management fee for the four-star Diamond Hill Large Cap Fund (DHLAX) from an annual rate of 0.55% to 0.50%.

Effective immediately, the minimum initial investment requirements for the Class I Shares of Falcon Focus SCV Fund (FALCX) are being lowered to $5,000 for direct regular accounts and $2,500 for direct retirement accounts, automatic investment plans and gift accounts for minors.

Here’s why we claim to report nothing grander than “small wins” for investors: the board of Gotham Absolute 500 Fund (GFIVX) has graciously agreed to reduce the management fee from 2.0% to 1.5% and the expense cap from 2.25% to 1.75%. All of this on an institutional long/short fund with high volatility and a $250,000 minimum. The advisor calculates that it actually costs them 5.42% to run the fund. The managers both have over $1 million in each of their four funds.

Grandeur Peak has reduced fees on two of its funds. Grandeur Peak Emerging Markets Opportunities Fund (GPEOX) to 1.95% and 1.70% and Grandeur Peak Global Reach Fund (GPGRX) to 1.60% and 1.35%.

Effective January 4, 2016, Royce Premier Fund (RYPRX) and Royce Special Equity Fund (RYSEX) will reopen to new shareholders. Why, you ask? Each fund’s assets have tumbled by 50% since 2013 as Premier trailed 98% of its peers and Special trailed 92%. Morningstar describes Special as “a compelling small-cap option” and gives it a Gold rating.

Teton Westwood Mid-Cap Equity Fund (WMCRX) has reduced the expense cap for Class I shares of the Fund to 0.80%.

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Effective as of the close of business on December 31, 2015, Emerald Growth Fund (HSPGX) closed to new investors

The Class A shares of Hatteras Managed Futures Strategies Fund were liquidated in mid-December. The institutional class (HMFIX) remains in operation for now. Given that there’s a $1 million minimum initial investment and far less than $1 million in assets in the fund, I suspect we’ll continue thinning out of liquid-alts category soon.

Effective as of the close of business on January 28, 2016, Vontobel International Equity Institutional (VTIIX) and Vontobel Global Equity Institutional Fund (VTEIX) will soft close. Given that the funds have only $30 million between them, I suspect that they’re not long for this world. 

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

At the end of February, Aberdeen Small Cap Fund (GSXAX) becomes Aberdeen U.S. Small Cap Equity Fund. Two bits of good news: (1) it’s already a very solid performer and (2) it already invests 93% of its money in U.S. small cap equities, so it’s not likely that that’s going to change. At the same time, Aberdeen Global Small Cap Fund (WVCCX) will become Aberdeen International Small Cap Fund. The news here is mixed: (1) the fund kinda sucks and (2) it already invests more than 80% of its money in international small cap equities, so it’s not likely that that’s going to change either.

Sometime in the first quarter of 2016, Arden Alternative Strategies Fund (ARDNX) becomes Aberdeen Multi-Manager Alternative Strategies Fund, following Aberdeen’s purchase of Arden Asset Management.

Effective on February 1, 2016: AC Alternatives Equity Fund, which hasn’t even launched yet, will change its name to AC Alternatives Long Short Fund. After the change, the fund will no longer be required to invest at least 80% of its portfolio in equities.

As of February 27, 2016, Balter Long/Short Equity Fund (BEQRX) becomes Balter L/S Small Cap Equity Fund.

At an as-yet unspecified date, Capital Innovations Global Agri, Timber, Infrastructure Fund (INNAX) will become RidgeWorth Capital Innovations Global Resources and Infrastructure Fund. Interesting little fund, the subject of an Elevator Talk several months ago.

Gator Opportunities Fund (GTOAX) is on its way to becoming BPV Small Cap Fund, likely by the beginning of summer, 2016. The fund will shed its mid-cap holdings in the process.

At the end of January 2016, Marsico Growth FDP Fund (MDDDX) will become FDP BlackRock Janus Growth Fund. Which is to say, yes, Marsico lost another sub-advisory contract.

Effective December 31, 2015, the Meeder Strategic Growth Fund (FLFGX) changed its name to Global Opportunities Fund.

On February 24, 2016, the T. Rowe Price Diversified Small-Cap Growth Fund (PRDSX) will change its name to the T. Rowe Price QM U.S. Small-Cap Growth Equity Fund. The addition of “QM” in the fund’s name reflects the concept that the fund employs a “quantitative management” strategy.

On March 1, Transamerica Asset Management will make a few tweaks to Transamerica Growth Opportunities (ITSAX). The managers will change (from Morgan Stanley to Alta Capital); likewise the “fund’s investment objective, principal investment strategies, principal risks, benchmark index, portfolio managers [and] name, will change. The fund will also have a lower advisory fee schedule.” The reborn fund will be named Transamerica Multi-Cap Growth.

Effective January 31, 2016, the principal investment strategy of Turner Emerging Growth Fund (TMCGX) shifts from focusing on “small and very small” cap stocks to “small and mid-cap” ones. The fund will also change its name to the Turner SMID Cap Growth Opportunities Fund. 

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

All Terrain Opportunity Fund (TERAX) liquidated on December 4, 2015. Why? It was only a year old, had $30 million in assets and respectable performance.

Big 4 OneFund (FOURX) didn’t make it to the New Years. The fund survived for all of 13 months before the managers despaired for the “inability to market the Fund.” It was a fund of DFA funds (good idea) which lost 12% in 12 months and trailed 94% of its peers. One wonders if the adviser should have ‘fessed up the “the inability to manage a fund that was worth buying”?

BPV Income Opportunities Fund liquidated on December 22, 2015, on about a week’s notice.

The Board of Trustees of Natixis Funds determined that it would be in the best interests of CGM Advisor Targeted Equity Fund (NEFGX) that it be liquidated, which will occur on February 17, 2016. Really, they said that: “it’s in the fund’s best interests to die.” The rest of the story is that CGM is buying itself back from Natixis; since Natixis won’t accept outside managers, the fund needed either to merge or liquidate. Natixis saw no logical place for it to merge, so it’s gone.

C Tactical Dynamic Fund (TGIFX) liquidated on December 31, 2015.

Clinton Long Short Equity Fund (WKCAX) liquidates on January 8, 2016.

Columbia has proposed merging away a half dozen of its funds, likely by mid-2016 though the date hasn’t yet been settled.

Acquired Fund	Acquiring Fund
Columbia International Opportunities	Columbia Select International Equity
Columbia International Value	Columbia Overseas Value
Columbia Large Cap Growth II, III, IV and V	Columbia Large Cap Growth
Columbia Multi-Advisor Small Cap Value	Columbia Select Smaller-Cap Value
Columbia Value and Restructuring	Columbia Contrarian Core

On or about March 31, 2016, the ESG Managers Growth Portfolio (PAGAX) will be consolidated into the ESG Managers Growth and Income Portfolio (PGPAX), which will then be renamed Pax Sustainable Managers Capital Appreciation Fund. At the same time, ESG Managers Balanced Portfolio (PMPAX) will be consolidated into the ESG Managers Income Portfolio (PWMAX) which will then be known as Pax Sustainable Managers Total Return Fund. The funds are all sub-advised by Morningstar staff.

Fortunatus Protactical New Opportunity Fund (FPOAX) liquidated on December 31, 2015. Why? The fund launched 12 months ago, had respectable performance and had drawn $40 million in assets. Perhaps combining the name of a 15^th century adventurer (and jerk) with an ugly neologism (protactical? really?) was too much to bear.

Foundry Small Cap Value Fund liquidated on December 31, 2015.

Frost Cinque Large Cap Buy-Write Equity Fund (FCBWX) will cease operations and liquidate on or about February 29, 2016.

The tiny, one-star Franklin All Cap Value Fund (FRAVX), a fund that’s about 60% small caps, is slated to merge with huge, two-star Franklin Small Cap Value Fund (FRVLX), pending shareholder approval. That will likely occur at the beginning of April.

Back in 2008, if you wanted to pick a new fund that was certain to succeed, you’d have picked GRT Value. It combined reasonable expenses, a straightforward discipline and the services of two superstar managers (Greg Frasier, who’d been brilliant at Fidelity Diversified International and Rudy Kluiber who beat everyone as manager of State Street Research Aurora). Now we learn that GRT Value Fund (GRTVX) and GRT Absolute Return Fund (GRTHX) will liquidate on or about January 25, 2016. What happened? Don’t know. The fund rocketed out of the gate then, after two years, began to wobble, then spiral down. Both Value and its younger sibling ended up as tiny, failed shells. Perhaps the managers’ attention was riveted on their six hedge funds or large private accounts? Presumably the funds’ fate was sealed by GRT’s declining business fortunes. According to SEC filing, the firm started 2015 with $950 million in AUM, which dropped by $785 million by June and $500 million by September. The declining size of their asset base was accompanied by a slight increase in the number of accounts they were managing, which suggests the departure of a few major clients and a scramble to replace them with new, smaller accounts.

The folks behind the Jacobs/Broel Value Fund (JBVLX) have decided to liquidate the fund based on “its inability to market the Fund and the Adviser’s indication that it does not desire to continue to support the Fund.” Nearly all of the assets in the fund are the managers’ own money, perhaps because others wondered about paying 1.4% for:

The fund will liquidate on January 15, 2016.

On or around January 28, 2016, JOHCM Emerging Markets Small Mid Cap Equity Fund Service Class shares (JOMIX) will liquidate.

The Board of Directors of the Manning & Napier Fund, Inc. has voted to completely liquidate the Focused Opportunities Series (MNFSX) on or about January 25, 2016.

HSBC Growth Fund (HOTAX) will cease its investment operations and liquidate on or about February 12, 2016. Apparently the combination of consistently strong results with a $78 million asset base was not compelling.

McKinley Diversified Income Fund (MCDRX) is merging with Innovator McKinley Income Fund (IMIFX), pending shareholder approval. The reorganization will occur January 29, 2016.

Leader Global Bond Fund (LGBMX) will close, cease operations, redeem all outstanding shares and liquidate, all on January 29, 2016.

Madison Large Cap Growth Fund (MCAAX) merges with and into the Madison Investors Fund (MNVAX) on February 29, 2016. The Board mentions the identical objectives, strategies, risk profile and management as reason for why the merger is logical.

The Newmark Risk-Managed Opportunistic Fund (NEWRX) liquidated on December 31, 2015. The Board attributed the decision to the fund’s small size, rather than to the underlying problem: consistently bad short- and long-term performance.

Nile Frontier and Emerging Fund (NFRNX) liquidated, on about three weeks’ notice, on December 31, 2015.

QES Dynamic Fund (QXHYX) liquidated on December 17, 2015, after a week’s notice.

On January 29, 2016, Redmont Resolute Fund I (RMREX) becomes Redmont Dissolute Fund as it, well, dissolves.

Royce has now put the proposals to merge Royce European Small-Cap Fund (RESNX) and Global Value (RIVFX) into Royce International Premier Fund (RYIPX) to their shareholders. The proposal comes disturbingly close to making the argument that, really, there isn’t much difference among the Royce funds. Here is Royce’s list of similarities:

• the same objective;
• the same managers;
• the same investment approach;
• the same investment universe, small-cap equities;
• the same sort of focused portfolio;
• all provide substantial exposure to foreign securities;
• the same policy on hedging;
• the same advisory fee rates;
• the same restrictions on investments in developing country securities; and
• almost identical portfolio turnover rates.

Skeptics have long suggested that that’s true of the Royce funds in general; they have pretty much one or two funds that have been marketed in the guise of 20 distinct funds.

Third Avenue Focused Credit Fund (TFCVX) nominally liquidated on December 9, 2015. As a practical matter, cash-on-hand was returned to shareholders and the remainder of the fund’s assets were placed in a trust. Over the next year or so, the adviser will attempt to find buyers for its various illiquid holdings. The former fund’s shareholders will receive dribs and drabs as individual holdings are sold “at reasonable prices.”

Valspresso Green Zone Select Tactical Fund liquidated on December 30, 2015.

On December 2, 2015, Virtus Disciplined Equity Style, Virtus Disciplined Select Bond and Virtus Disciplined Select Country funds were liquidated.

Whitebox is getting out of the mutual fund business. They’ve announced plans to liquidate their Tactical Opportunities (WBMAX), Market Neutral Equity (WBLSX) and Tactical Advantage (WBIVX) funds on or about January 19, 2016.

In Closing . . .

In case you sometimes wonder, “Did I learn anything in the past year?” Josh Brown offered a great year-end compendium of observations from his friends and acquaintances, fittingly entitled “In 2015, I learned that …” Extra points if you can track down the source of “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.”

And as for me, thanks and thanks and thanks! Thanks to the 140 or so folks who’ve joined MFO Premium as a way of supporting everything we’re doing. Thanks to the folks who’ve shared books, both classic (Irrational Exuberance, 3e) and striking (Spain: The Centre of the World, 1519-1682) and chocolates. I’m so looking forward to a quiet winter’s evening to begin them. Thanks to the folks who’ve read us and written to us, both the frustrated and the effusive. Thanks to my colleagues, Charles, Ed and Chip, who do more than I could possibly deserve. Thanks to the folks on the discussion board, who keep it lively and civil and funny and human. Thanks to the folks who’ve volunteered to help me learn to be halfway a businessperson, Sisyphus had it easier.

And thanks, especially, to all of you who’ll be here again next month.

We’ll look for you.