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.

Photo courtesy of Augustana Spring Photo Contest winner, Shelby Burroughs.

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.

Thanks to Ryan Leggio of FPA for sharing this chart and John Hussman for creating it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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,

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.

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.

Dear friends,

They’re baaaaaack!

My students came rushing back to campus and, so far as I can tell, triggered some sort of stock market rout upon arrival. I’m not sure how they did it, but I’ve learned not to underestimate their energy and manic good spirits.

They’re a bright bunch, diverse in my ways. While private colleges are often seen as bastion of privilege, Augustana was founded to help the children of immigrants make their way in a new land. Really that mission hasn’t much changed in the past 150 years: lots of first-generation college students, lots of students of color, lots of kids who shared the same high school experience. They weren’t the class presidents so much as the ones who quietly worked to make sure that things got done.

It’s a challenge to teach them, not because they don’t want to learn but because the gulf between us is so wide. By the time they were born, I was already a senior administrator and a full-blown fuddy duddy. But we’re working, as always we do, to learn from each other. Humility is essential, both a sense of humor and cookies help.

Your first and best stop-loss order

The week’s events have convinced us that you all need to learn how to execute a stop-loss order to protect yourself in times like these. A stop-loss order is an automatic, pre-established command which kicks in when markets gyrate and which works to minimize your losses. Generally they’re placed through your broker (“if shares of X fall below $12/share, sell half my holdings. If it falls below $10, liquidate the position”) but an Observer Stop Loss doesn’t require one. Here’s how it works:

• On any day in which the market falls by enough to make you go “sweet Jee Zus!”
• Step Away from the Media
• Put Down your Phone
• Unhand that Mouse
• And Do Nothing for seven days.

Well, more precisely, “do nothing with your portfolio.” You’re more than welcome to, you know, have breakfast, go to the bathroom, wonder what it’s going to take for anyone to catch the Cardinals, figure out what you’re going to do with that ridiculous pile of tomatoes and all that.

My Irish grandfather told me that the worst time to fix a leaky roof is in a storm. “You’ll be miserable, you might break your neck and you’ll surely make a hames of it.” (I knew what Gramps meant and didn’t get around to looking up the “hames” bit until decades later when I was listening to the thunder and staring at a growing damp spot in the ceiling.)

The financial media loves financial cataclysm to the same extent, and for the same reason, that The Weather Channel loves superstorms. It’s a great marketing tool for them. It strokes their egos (we are important!). And it drives ratings.

Really, did you think this vogue for naming winter storms came from the National Weather Service? No, no, no.  “Winter Storm Juno” was straight from the marketing folks at TWC.

If CNBC’s ratings get any worse, I’m guessing that we’ll be subjected to Market Downturn Alan soon enough.

By and large, coverage of the market’s recent events has been relentlessly horrible. Let’s start with the obvious: if you invested $10,000 into a balanced portfolio on August 18, on Friday, August 28 you had $9,660.

That’s it. You dropped 3.4%.

(Don’t you feel silly now?)

The most frequently-invoked word in headlines? “Bloodbath.”

MarketWatch: What’s next after market’s biggest bloodbath of the year ? (Apparently they’re annual events.)

ZeroHedge: US Market Bouncing Back After Monday’s Bloodbath (hmm, maybe they’re weekly events?)

Business Insider: Six horrific stats about today’s market bloodbath. (“Oil hit its lowest level since March 2009.” The horror, the horror!)

ZeroHedge: Bloodbath: Emerging Market Assets Collapse. (Ummm … a $10,000 investment in an emerging markets balanced fund, FTEMX in this case, would have “collapsed” to $9872 over those two weeks.)

RussiaToday: It’s a Bloodbath. (Odd that this is the only context in which Russia Today is willing to apply that term.)

By Google’s count, rather more than 64,000 market bloodbaths in the media.

Those claims were complemented by a number of “yeah, it could get a lot worse” stories:

NewsMax: Yale’s Shiller, “Even bigger” plunge may follow.

Brett Arends: Dow 5,000? Yes, it could happen. (As might a civilization-ending asteroid strike or a Cubs’ World Series win.)

Those were bookended with celebratory but unsubstantiated claims (WSJ: U.S. stock swings don’t shake investors; Barry Ritholz: Mom and pop outsmart Wall Street pros) that “mom ‘n’ pop” stood firm.

Bottom line: nothing you read in the media over the past couple weeks improved either your short- or long-term prospects. To the contrary, it might well have encouraged you (or your clients) to do something emotionally satisfying and financially idiotic. The markers of panic and idiocy abound: Vanguard had to do the “all hands on deck” drill in which portfolio managers and others are pulled in to manage the phone banks, Morningstar’s site repeatedly froze, the TD Ameritrade and Scottrade sites couldn’t execute customer orders, and prices of thousands of ETFs became unmoored from the prices of the securities they held. We were particularly struck by trading volume for Vanguard’s Total Stock Market ETF (VTI).

That’s a 600% rise from its average volume.

Two points:

1. Winter is coming. Work on your roof now!

   Some argue that a secular bear market started last week. (Some always say that.) Some serious people argue that a sharp jolt this year might well be prelude to a far larger disruption later next year. Optimists believe that we are on a steadily ascending path, although the road will be far more pitted than in recent memory.

   Use the time you have now to plan for those developments. If you looked at your portfolio and thought “I didn’t know it could be this bad this fast,” it’s time to rethink.

   Questions worth considering:

   • Are you ready to give up Magical Thinking yet? Here’s the essence of Magical Thinking: “Eureka! I’ve found it! The fund that makes over 10% in the long-term and sidesteps turbulence in the short-term! And it’s mine. Mine! My Preciousssss!” Such a fund does not exist in the lands of Middle-Earth. Stop expecting your funds to act as if they do.
   • Do you have more funds in your portfolio than you can explain? Did you look at your portfolio Monday and think, honestly puzzled, “what is that fund again?”
   • Do you know whether traditional hybrid funds, liquid alt funds or a slug of low-volatility assets is working better as your risk damper? Folks with either a mordant sense of humor or stunted perspective declared last week that liquid alts funds “passed their first test with flying colors.” Often that translated to: “held up for one day while charging 2.75% for one year.”
   • Have you allocated more to risky assets than you can comfortably handle? We’re written before about the tradeoffs embedded in a stock-light strategy where 70% of the upside for 50% of the downside begins to sound less like cowardice and more like an awfully sweet deal.
   • Are you willing to believe that the structure of the fixed income market will allow your bond funds to deliver predictable total returns (current income plus appreciation) over the next five to seven years? If critics are right, a combination of structural changes in the fixed-income markets brought on by financial reforms and rising interest rates might make traditional investment-grade bond funds a surprisingly volatile option.

   If your answer is something like “I dunno,” then your answer is also something like “I’m setting myself up to fail.” We’ll try to help, but you really do need to set aside some time to plan (goals –> resources –> strategies –>tactics) with another grown-up. Bring black coffee if you’re Lutheran, Scotch if you aren’t.

2. If you place your ear tightly against the side of any ETF, you’re likely to hear ticking.

   My prejudices are clear and I’ll repeat them here. I think ETFs are the worst financial innovation since the Ponzi scheme. They are trading vehicles, not investment vehicles. The Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF has no advantage over the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index fund (the tiny expense gap is consumed in trading costs) except that it can be easily and frequently traded. The little empirical research available documents the inevitable: when given a trading vehicle, investors trade. And (the vast majority of) traders lose.

   Beyond that, ETFs cause markets to move in lockstep: all securities in an ETF – the rock solid and the failing, the undervalued and the overpriced – are rewarded equally when investors purchase the fund. If people like small cap Japanese stocks, they bid up the price of good stocks and bad, cheap and dear, which distorts the ability of vigilantes to enforce some sort of discipline.

   And, as Monday demonstrates, ETFs can fail spectacularly in a crisis because the need for instant pricing is inconsistent with the demands of rational pricing. Many ETFs, CEFs and some stocks opened Monday with 20-30% losses, couldn’t coordinate buyers and sellers fast enough and that caused a computer-spawned downward price spiral. Josh Brown makes the argument passionately in his essay “Computers are the new dumb money” and followed it up with the perhaps jubilant report that some of the “quants I know told me the link was hitting their inboxes all day from friends and colleagues around the industry. A few desk traders I talk to had some anecdotes backing my assumptions up. One guy, a ‘data scientist’, was furiously angry, meaning he probably blew himself up this week.”

   As Chris Dietrich concludes in his August 29 Barron’s article, “Market Plunge Provides Harsh Lessons for ETF Investors”

   For long-term investors unsure of their trading chops, or if uncertainty reigns, mutual funds might be better options. Mutual fund investors hand over their money and let the fund company do the trading. The difference is that you get the end-of-day price; the price of an ETF depends on when you sold or bought it during the trading day. “There are benefits of ETFs, including transparency and tax efficiency, but those come at a cost, which is that is you must be willing to trade,” says Dave Nadig, director of ETFs at FactSet Research Systems. “If you don’t want to be trading, you should not be using ETFs.”

The week’s best

Jack Bogle, Buddhist. Jack Bogle: “I’ve seen turbulence in the market. This is not real turbulence. Don’t do something. Just stand there.” (Thanks for johnN for the link.) Vanguard subsequently announced, “The Inaction Plan.”

All sound and fury, signifying nothing. Jason Zweig: “The louder and more forcefully a market pundit voices his certainty about what is going to happen next, the more likely it is that he will turn out to be wrong.”

Profiting from others’ insanity

Anyone looking at the Monday, 8/24, opening price for, say, General Electric – down 30% within the first few seconds – had to think (a) that’s insanity and (b) hmmm, wonder if there’s a way to profit from it? It turns out that the price of a number of vehicles – stocks, a thousand ETFs and many closed-end funds – became temporarily unmoored from reality. The owners of many ETFs, for example, were willing to sell $10 worth of stock for $7, just to get rid of it.

The folks at RiverNorth are experts at arbitraging such insanity. They track the historical discounts of closed-end funds; if a fund becomes temporarily unmoored, they’ll consider buying shares of it. Why? Because when the panic subsides, that 30% discount might contract by two-thirds. RiverNorth’s shareholders have the opportunity to gain from that arbitrage, whether or not the general direction of the stock market is up or down.

I spoke with Steve O’Neill, one of RiverNorth’s portfolio managers, about the extent of the market panic. Contrary to the popular stories about cool-headed investors, Steve described them as “vomiting up assets” at a level he hadn’t seen since the depth of the financial meltdown when the stability of the entire banking sector was in question.

In 2014, RiverNorth reopened their flagship RiverNorth Core Opportunity (RNCOX) fund after a three-year closure. We’ll renew our profile of this one-of-a-kind product in our October issue. In the meanwhile, interested parties really should …

RiverNorth is hosting a live webcast with Q&A on September 17, 2015 at 3:15pm CT / 4:15pm ET. Their hosts will be Patrick Galley, CIO, Portfolio Manager, and Allen Webb, Portfolio Specialist. Visit www.rivernorth.com/events to register.

Update: Finding a family’s first fund 

In August, we published a short guide to finding a family first fund. We started with the premise that lots of younger (and many not-so-younger) folks were torn between the knowledge that they should do something and the fear that they were going to screw it up. To help them out, we talked about what to look for in a first fund and proposed three funds that met our criteria: solid long term prospects, a risk-conscious approach, a low minimum initial investment and reasonable expenses.

How did the trio do in August? Not bad.

 Several readers wrote to commend Manning & Napier Pro-Blend Conservative (EXDAX) as a great “first fund” candidate as well.  We entirely agree. Unlike TIAA-CREF and Vanguard, it invests in individual securities rather than other funds. Like them, however, it has a team-managed approach that reduces the risk of a fund going awry if a single person leaves. It has a splendid 20 year record. We’ve added it to our original guide and have written a profile of the fund, which you can get to below in our Fund Profiles section.

We Are Where We Are, Or, If The Dog Didn’t Stop To Crap, He Would Have Caught The Rabbit

“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”

               Michel de Montaigne

At this point in time, rather than focus on the “if only” questions that tend to freeze people in their tracks in these periods of market volatility, I think we should consider what is important. For most of us, indeed, the vast majority of us, the world did not end in August and it is unlikely to end in September.  Indeed, for most Americans and therefore by definition most of us, the vagaries of the stock market are not that important.

What then is important? A Chicago Tribune columnist, Mary Schmich, recently interviewed Edward Stuart, an economics professor at Northeastern Illinois University as a follow-up to his appearance on a panel on Chicago Public Television’s “Chicago Tonight” show. Stuart had pointed out that the ownership of stock (and by implication, mutual funds) in the United States is quite unequal. He noted that while the stock market has done very well in recent years, the standard of living of the average American citizen has not done as well. Stuart thinks that the real median income for a household size of four is about $40,000 …. and that number has not changed since the late 70’s. My spin on this is rather simple – the move up the economic ladder that we used to see for various demographic groups – has stopped.

If you think about it, the evidence is before us. How many of us have friends whose children went to college, got their degrees, and returned home to live with their parents while they hunted for a job in their chosen field, which they often could not find? When one drives around city and suburban streets, how many vacancies do we see in commercial properties?  How many middle class families that used to bootstrap themselves up by investing in and owning apartment buildings or strip malls don’t now? What is needed is a growing economy that offers real job prospects that pay real wages. Stuart also pointed out that student debt is one of the few kinds of debt that one cannot expunge with bankruptcy.

As I read that piece of Ms. Schmick’s and reflected on it, I was reminded of another column I had read a few months back that talked about where we had gone off the rails collectively. The piece was entitled “Battle for the Boardroom” by Joe Nocera and was in the NY Times on May 9, 2015. Nocera was discussing the concept of “activist investors” and “shareholder value” specifically as it pertained to Nelson Peltz, Trian Investments, and a proxy fight with the management and board of DuPont.  And Nocera pointed out that Trian, by all accounts, had a good record and was often a constructive force once it got a board seat or two.

Nocera’s concern, which he raised in a fashion that went straight for the jugular, was simple. Have we really reached the point where the activist investor gets to call the tune, no matter how well run the company? What is shareholder value, especially in a company like DuPont? Trian’s argument was that DuPont was not getting a return on its spending on research and development? Yet R&D spending is what made DuPont, given the years it takes to often produce from scientific research a commercial product. Take away the R&D spending argued Nocera, and you have not just a poorer DuPont, but also a poorer United States. He closed by talking with and quoting Martin Lipton, a corporate attorney who has made a career out of disparaging corporate activists. Lipton said, “Activism has caused companies to cut R&D, capital investment, and, most significantly, employment,” he said. “It forces companies to lay off employees to meet quarterly earnings.”

“It is,” he concluded, “a disaster for the country.”

This brings me to my final set of ruminations. Some years ago, my wife and I were guests at a small dinner party at the home of a former ambassador (and patriot) living in Santa Fe.  There were a total of six of us at that dinner. One of the other guests raised the question as to whether any of us ever thought about what things would have been like for the country if Al Gore, rather than George W. Bush, had won the presidential election. My immediate response was that I didn’t think about such things as it was just far too painful to contemplate.

In like vein, having recently read Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men, I have been forced to contemplate what it would have meant for the country if President-elect Barack Obama had actually followed through with the recommendations of his transition advisors and appointed his “A” Economic Team. Think about it – Paul Volcker as Secretary of the Treasury, the resurrection of Glass-Steagall, the break-up of the big investment banks – it too is just too painful to contemplate.  Or as the line from T.H. White’s Once and Future King goes, “I dream things that never were, and ask why not?”

Now, a few thoughts about the carnage and how to deal with it.  Have a plan and stick to it. Do not panic, for inevitably all panic does is lead to self-inflicted wounds. Think about fees, but from the perspective of correlated investments. That is, if five large (over $10B in assets) balanced funds are all positively correlated in terms of their portfolios, does it really make sense not to own the one with the lowest expense ratio (and depending on where it is held, taxes may come into play)? Think about doing things where other people’s panic does not impact you, e.g., is there a place for closed end funds in a long-term investment portfolio? And avoid investments where the bugs have not been worked out, as the glitches in pricing and execution of trades for ETF’s have shown us over the last few weeks.

There is a wonderful Dilbert cartoon where the CEO says “Asok, you can beat market averages by doing your own stock research. Asok then says, “So … You believe every investor can beat the average by reading the same information? “Yes” says the CEO. Asok then says, “Makes you wonder why more people don’t do it.” The CEO closes saying, “Just lazy, I guess.”

Edward A. Studzinski

Checking in on MFO’s 20-year Great Owls

MFO first introduced its rating system in the June 2013 commentary. That’s also when the first “Great Owl” funds were designated. These funds have consistently delivered top quintile risk adjusted returns (based on Martin Ratio) in their categories for evaluation periods 3 years and longer. The most senior are 20-year Great Owls. These select funds have received Return Group ranking of 5 for evaluation periods of 3, 5, 10, and 20 years. Only about 50 funds of the 1500 mutual funds aged 20 years or older, or about 3%, achieve the GO designation. An impressive accomplishment.

Below are the current 20-year GOs (excluding muni funds for compactness, but find complete list here, also reference MFO Ratings Definitions.)

Of the original 20-year GO list of 47 funds still in existence today, only 19 remain GOs. These include notables: Fidelity GNMA (FGMNX), PIMCO Foreign Bond – USD-Hedged I (PFORX), James Balanced: Golden Rainbow R (GLRBX), T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation (PRWCX), Vanguard Wellington Inv (VWELX), Meridian Growth Legacy (MERDX), and Hennessy Gas Utility Investor (GASFX).

The current 20-year GOs also include 25 Honor Roll funds, based on legacy Fund Alarm ranking system. Honor Roll funds have delivered top quintile absolute returns in its category for evaluation periods of 1, 3, and 5 years. These include: AMG Managers Interm Dur Govt (MGIDX), PIMCO Foreign Bond – USD-Hedged I (PFORX), James Balanced: Golden Rainbow R (GLRBX), T. Rowe Price Capital Appreciation (PRWCX), and T. Rowe Price Mid-Cap Growth (RPMGX).

A closer look at performance of the original list of 20-year GOs, since they were introduced a little more than two years ago, shows very satisfactory performance overall, even with funds not maintaining GO designation. Below is a summary of Return Group rankings and current three-year performance.

Of the 31 funds in tables above, only 7 have underperformed on a risk adjusted basis during the past three years, while 22 have outperformed.

Some notable outperformers include: Vanguard Wellesley Income Inv (VWINX), Oakmark International I (OAKIX), Sequoia (SEQUX), Brown Capital Mgmt Small Co Inv (BCSIX), and T. Rowe Price New Horizons (PRNHX).

And the underperformers? Waddell & Reed Continental Inc A (UNCIX), AMG Yacktman (YACKX), Gabelli Equity Income AAA (GABEX), and Voya Corporate Leaders Trust (LEXCX).

A look at absolute returns shows that 10 of the 31 underperformed their peers by an average of 1.6% annualized return, while the remaining 21 beat their peers by an average of 4.8%.

Gentle reminder: MFO ratings are strictly quantitative and backward looking. No accounting for manager or adviser changes, survivorship bias, category drift, etc.

Will take a closer look at the three-year mark and make habit of posting how they have fared over time.

New Voices at the Observer: The Tale of Two Leeighs

We’re honored this month to be joined by two new contributors: Sam Lee and Leigh Walzer.

Sam is the founder of Severian Asset Management, Chicago. He is also former editor of Morningstar analyst and editor of their ETF Investor newsletter. Sam has been celebrated as one of the country’s best financial writers (Morgan Housel: “Really smart takes on ETFs, with an occasional killer piece about general investment wisdom”) and as Morningstar’s best analyst and one of their best writers (John Coumarianos: “Lee has written two excellent pieces [in the span of a month], and his showing himself to be Morningstar’s finest analyst”). Sam claims to have chosen “Severian” for its Latinate gravitas.

We’ll set aside, for now, any competing observations. For example, we’ll make no mention of the Severian Asset Management’s acronym. And certainly no reflections upon the fact that Severian was the name of the Journeyman torturer who serves as narrator in a series of Gene Wolfe’s speculative fiction. Nor that another Severian was a popular preacher and bishop. Hmmm … had I mentioned that one of Sam’s most popular pieces is “Losing My Religion”?

You get a better sense of what Sam brings to the table from his discussion of his approach to things as an investment manager:

Investing well is hard. We approach the challenge with a great deal of humility, and try to learn from the best thinkers we can identify. One of our biggest influences is Warren Buffett, who stresses that predictions about the future should be based on an understanding of economic fundamentals and human nature, not on historical returns, correlations and volatilities. He stresses that we should be skeptical of the false precision and unwarranted sense of control that come with the use of quantitative tools, such as Monte Carlo simulations and Markowitz optimizations. We take these warnings seriously.

Our approach is based on economic principles that we believe are both true and important:

• First and foremost, we believe an asset’s true worth is determined by the cash you can pull out of it discounted by the appropriate interest rate. Over the long run, prices tend to converge to intrinsic value … Where we differ with Buffett and other value investors is that we do not believe investment decisions should be made solely on the basis of intrinsic value. It is perfectly legitimate to invest in a grossly overpriced asset if one knows a sucker will shortly come along to buy it … The trick is anticipating what the suckers will do.
• Second, we believe most investors should diversify. As Buffett says, “diversification is protection against ignorance.” This should not be interpreted as a condemnation of the practice. Most investors are ignorant as to what the future holds. Because most of us are ignorant and blind, we want to maximize the protection diversification affords.
• Third, we believe risk and reward are usually, but not always, positively related … Despite equities’ attractive long-term returns, investors have managed to destroy enormous amounts of wealth while investing in them by buying high and selling low. To avoid this unfortunate outcome, we scale your equity exposure to your behavioral makeup, as well as your time horizon and goals.
• Fourth, the market makes errors, but exploiting them is hard.

We prefer to place actively managed funds (and other high-tax-burden assets) in tax-deferred accounts. In taxable accounts, we prefer tax-efficient, low-cost equities, either held directly or through mutual funds. Many exchange-traded funds are particularly tax-advantaged because they can aggressively rid themselves of low cost-basis shares without passing on capital gains to their investors.

In my experience, Sam’s writing is bracingly direct, thoughtful and evidence-driven. I think you’ll like his work and I’m delighted by his presence. Sam’s debut offering is a thoughtful and data rich profile of AQR Style Premia Alternative (QSPIX). You’ll find a summary and link to his profile under Observer Fund Profiles.

Leigh Walzer is now a principal of Trapezoid LLC and a former member of Michael Price’s merry band at the Mutual Series funds. In his long career, Leigh has brought his sharp insights and passion for data to mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity funds and even the occasional consulting firm.

We had a chance to meet during June’s Morningstar conference, where he began to work through the logic of his analysis of funds with me. Two things were quickly clear to me. First, he was doing something distinctive and interesting. As base, Leigh tried to identify the distinct factors that might qualify as types of managerial skill (two examples would be stock selection and knowing when to reduce risk exposure) and then find the data that might allow him to take apart a fund’s performance, analyze its component parts and predict whether success might persist. Second, I was in over my head. I asked Leigh if he’d be willing to share sort of bite-sized bits of his research so that folks could begin to understand his system and test the validity of its results. He agreed.

Here’s Leigh’s introduction to you all. His first analytic piece debuts next month.

Mutual Fund Observer performs a great service for the investment community. I have found information in these pages which is hard to obtain anywhere else. It is a privilege to be able to contribute.

I founded Trapezoid a few years ago after a long career in the mutual fund and hedge fund industry as an analyst and portfolio manager. Although I majored in statistics at Princeton many moons ago and have successfully modelled professional sports in the past, most of my investing was in credit and generally not quantitative in nature. As David Snowball mentioned earlier, I spent 7 years working for Mutual Shares, led by Michael Price. So the development of the Orthogonal Attribution Engine marks a return to my first passion.

I have always been interested in whether funds deliver value for investors and how accurately allocators and investors understand their managers.  My freshman economics course was taught by Burton Malkiel, author of a Random Walk Down Wall Street, who preached that the capital markets were pretty efficient. My experience in Wall Street and my work at Orthogonal have taught me this is not always true.  Sometimes a manager or a strategy can significantly outperform the market for a sustained period.  Of course, competitors react and capital flows until an equilibrium is achieved, but not nearly as quickly as Malkiel assumes.

There has been much discussion over the years about the active–passive debate.  John Bogle was generous in his time reviewing my work.  I generally agree with Jack and he is a giant in the industry to whom we all owe a great deal.  For those who are ready to throw in the towel of active investing, Bogle makes two (related) assumptions which need to be critically reviewed:

1. Even if an active manager outperforms the average, he is likely to revert to the mean.
2. Active managers with true skill (in excess of their fee structure) are hard to identify, so investors are better off with an index fund

I try to measure skill in a way which is more accurate (and multi-faceted) than Bogle’s definition and I look at skill as a statistical process best measured over an extended period of time. I try to understand how the manager is positioned at every point in time, using both holdings and regression data, and I try to understand the implications of his or her decisions.

My work indicates that the active-passive debate is less black and white than you might discern from the popular press or the marketing claims of mutual fund managers. The good news for investors is there are in fact many managers who have demonstrated skill over an extended period of time. Using statistical techniques, it is possible to identify managers likely to outperform in the future. There are some funds whose expected return over the next 12 months justifies what they charge. There are many other managers who show investment skill, but not enough to justify their expense structure.

Feel free to check out the website at www.fundattribution.com which is currently in beta test. Over 30,000 funds are modelled; users who register for demo access can see certain metrics measuring historic manager skill and likelihood of future success on a subset of the fund universe.

I look forward to sharing with you insights on specific funds in the coming months and provide MFO readers a way to track my results. Equally important, I hope to give you new insights to help you think about the role of actively managed funds in your portfolio and how to select funds. My research is still a work in process. I invite the readership of MFO to join me in my journey and invite feedback, suggestions, and collaboration.  You may contact me at [email protected].

We’re very much looking forward to October and Leigh’s first essay. Thanks to both. I think you’ll enjoy their good spirits and insight.

Top developments in fund industry litigation

Fundfox, launched in 2012, is the mutual fund industry’s only litigation intelligence service, delivering exclusive litigation information and real-time case documents neatly organized, searchable, and filtered as never before. For the complete list of developments last month, and for information and court documents in any case, log in at www.fundfox.com and navigate to Fundfox Insider.

Court Decisions & Orders

• In the shareholder litigation regarding gambling-related securities held by the American Century Ultra Fund, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of American Century, agreeing that the shareholder could not bring suit against the fund adviser because the fund had declined to do so in a valid exercise of business judgment. Defendants included independent directors. (Seidl v. Am. Century Cos.)
• Setting the stage for a rare section 36(b) trial (assuming no settlement), a court denied parties’ summary judgment motions in fee litigation regarding multiple AXA Equitable funds. The court cited only “reasons set forth on the record.” (Sanford v. AXA Equitable Funds Mgmt. Group, LLC; Sivolella v. AXA Equitable Life Ins. Co.)
• A court gave its final approval to (1) a $24 million partial settlement of the state-law class action regarding Northern Trust‘s securities lending program, and (2) a $36 million settlement of interrelated ERISA claims. The state-law class action is still proceeding with respect to plaintiffs who invested directly in the program. (Diebold v. N. Trust Invs., N.A.; La. Firefighters’ Ret. Sys. v. N. Trust Invs., N.A.)
• In the long-running fee litigation regarding Oakmark funds that had made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Seventh Circuit affirmed a lower court’s grant of summary judgment for defendant Harris Associates. The appeals court cited the lower court’s findings that (1) “Harris’s fees were in line with those charged by advisers for other comparable funds” and (2) “the fees could not be called disproportionate in relation to the value of Harris’s work, as the funds’ returns (net of fees) exceeded the norm for comparable investment vehicles.” Plaintiffs have filed a petition for rehearing en banc. (Jones v. Harris Assocs.)
• Extending the fund industry’s dismal record on motions to dismiss section 36(b) litigation, a court denied PIMCO‘s motion to dismiss an excessive-fee lawsuit regarding the Total Return Fund. Court: “Throughout their Motion, Defendants grossly exaggerate ‘the specifics’ needed to survive a 12(b)(6) motion, essentially calling for Plaintiff to prove his case now, before discovery.” (Kenny v. Pac. Inv. Mgmt. Co.)
• A court granted the motion to dismiss a state-law and RICO class action alleging mismanagement by a UBS investment adviser, but without prejudice to refile the state-law claims as federal securities fraud claims. (Knopick v. UBS Fin. Servs., Inc.)

The Alt Perspective: Commentary and news from DailyAlts.

As we all now know, August was anything but calm. Despite starting that way, the month delivered some tough love in the last two weeks, just when we were all supposed to be relaxing with family and friends. Select Morningstar mutual fund categories finished the month with the following returns:

• Large Blend (US Equity): -6.07%
• Intermediate-Term Bond: -0.45%
• Long/Short Equity: -3.57%
• Nontraditional Bonds: -0.91%
• Managed Futures: -2.52%

The one surprise of the five categories above is Managed Futures. This is a category that typically does well when markets are in turmoil and trending down. August proved to be an inflection point, and turned out to be challenging in what was otherwise a solid year for the strategies.

However, let’s take a look at balanced portfolio configurations. Using the above category returns, at traditional long-only 60/40 blend portfolio (60% stocks / 40% bonds) would have returned -3.82% in August, while an alternative balanced portfolio of 50% long/short equity, 30% nontraditional bonds and 20% managed futures would have returned -2.56%. Compare these to the two categories below:

• Moderate Allocation: -4.17%
• Multialternative: -2.22%

Moderate Allocation funds, which are relatively lower risk balance portfolios, turned in the lowest of the balanced portfolio configurations. The Multialternative category of funds, which are balanced portfolios made up of mostly alternative strategies, performed the best, beating the traditional 60/40 portfolio, the 50/30/20 alternative portfolio and the Moderate Allocation category. Overall, it looks like alternatives did their job in August.

August Highlights

Believe it or not, Vanguard launched its second alternative mutual fund in August. The new Vanguard Alternative Strategies Fund will invest across several alternative investment strategies, including long/short equity and event driven, and will also allocate some assets to currencies and commodities. Surprisingly, Vanguard will be managing the fund in-house, but does that the ability to outsource some or all of the management of the fund. Sticking with its low cost focus, Vanguard will charge a management fee of 0.18% – a level practically unheard of in the liquid alternatives space.

In a not quite so surprising move, Catalyst Funds converted its fourth hedge fund into a mutual fund in August with the launch of the Catalyts/Auctos Multi Strategy Fund. In this instance, the firm did go one step beyond prior conversions and actually acquired the underlying manager, Auctos Capital Management. One key benefit of the hedge fund conversion is the fact that the fund can retain its performance track record, which dates back to 2008.

Finally, American Century (yes, that conservative, mid-western asset management firm) launched a new brand called AC Alternatives under which it will manage a series of alternative mutual funds. The firm currently has three funds under the new brand, with two more in the works. Similar to Vanguard, the firm launched a market neutral fund back in 2005, and a value tilted version in 2011. The third fund, an alternative income fund, is new this year.

Let’s Get Together

Two notable acquisitions occurred in August. The first is the acquisition of Arden Asset Management, a long-time institutional fund-of-hedge funds manager, by Aberdeen. The latter has been on the acquisition trail over the past several years, with a keen eye on alternative investment firms. Through the transaction, Arden will get global distribution, while Aberdeen will pick up very specific hedge fund due diligence, manager research and portfolio construction capabilities. Looks like a win-win.

The second transaction was the acquisition of 51% of the Australian-based unconstrained fixed income shop Kapstream Capital by Janus for a cool $85 million. Janus also has the right to purchase the remainder of the firm, which has roughly $6 billion under management. Good for Kapstream as the valuation appears to be on the high end, but perhaps Bill Gross needed some assistance managed his unconstrained portfolios.

The Fall

A lot happens in the Fall. Back to school. Football. Interest rate hike. Changing leaves. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Federal debt ceiling. Maybe there is enough for us all to take our minds off the markets for just a bit and let things settle down. Time will tell, but until next month, enjoy the Labor Day weekend and the beginning of a new season.

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 Style Premia Alternative (QSPIX). AQR’s new long-short multi-strategy fund takes factor investing to its logical extreme: It applies four distinct strategies–value, momentum, carry, and defensive–across stock, bond, commodity, and currency markets. The standard version of the fund targets a 10% volatility and a 0.7 Sharpe ratio while maintaining low to no correlation with conventional portfolios. In its short life, the fund has delivered in spades. Please note, this profile was written by our colleague, Sam Lee.

Manning & Napier Pro-Blend Conservative (EXDAX): this fund has been navigating market turbulences for two decades now. Over the course of the 21^st century, it’s managed to outperform the Total Stock Market Index with only one-third of the stocks and one-third of the volatility. And you can start with just $25!  

TCW/Gargoyle Hedged Value (TFHVX/TFHIX):  if you understand what you’re getting – a first-rate value fund with one important extra – you’re apt to be very happy. If you see “hedged” and think “tame,” you’ve got another thing coming.

Launch Alert: Falcon Focused SCV (FALCX)

The fact that newly-launched Falcon Focused SCV has negligible assets (it’s one of the few funds in the world where I could write a check and become the fund’s largest shareholder) doesn’t mean that it has negligible appeal.

The fund is run by Kevin Silverman whose 30 year career has been split about equally between stints on the sell side and on the buy side.  He’s a graduate of the University of Wisconsin’s well-respect Applied Securities Analysis Program . Early in his career he served as an analyst at Oakmark and around the turn of the century was one of the managers of ABN AMRO Large Cap Growth Fund. He cofounded Falcon Capital Management in April 2015 and is currently one of the folks responsible for a $100 million small cap value strategy at Dearborn Partners in Chicago. They’ve got an audited 14 year record.

I’m endlessly attracted to the potential of small cap value investing. The research, famously French and Fama’s, and common sense concur: this should be the area with the greatest potential for profits. It’s huge. It’s systemically mispriced because there’s so little analyst coverage and because investors undervalue value stocks. Growth stocks are all cool and sexy and you want to own them and brag to all your friends about them. Value stocks are generally goofed up companies in distressed industries. They’re boring and a bit embarrassing to own; on whole, they’re sort of the midden heap of the investing world.

The average investor’s unwillingness or inability to consider them raises the prospect that a really determined investor might find exceptional returns. Kevin and his folks try to build 5 to 10 year models for all of their holdings, then look seriously at years four and five. The notion is that if they can factor emotion out of the process (they invoke the pilot’s mantra, “trust your instruments”) and extend their vision beyond the current obsession with this quarter and next quarter, they’ll find opportunities that will pay off handsomely a few years from now. Their target is to use their models to construct a portfolio that has the prospect for returns “in the mid-20s over the next three years.” Mathematically, that works out to a doubling in just over three years.

I’m not sure that the guys can pull it off but they’re disciplined, experienced and focused. That puts them ahead of a lot of their peers.

The initial expense ratio, after waivers, is 1.25%. The no-load Institutional shares carry a $10,000 minimum, which is reduced to $5000 for tax-advantaged accounts and those set up with an automatic investing plan. The fund’s website is still pretty sparse (okay, just under “pretty sparse”), but you can find a bit more detail and one pretty panorama at the adviser’s website.

Launch Alert: Grandeur Peak Global Stalwarts Fund (GGSOX/GGSYX)

Grandeur Peak launched two “alumni” funds on September 1, 2015. Grandeur Peak’s specialty is global micro- and small-cap stocks, generally at the growth end of the spectrum. If they do a good job, their microcap stocks soon become small caps, their small caps become midcaps, and both are at risk of being ejected from the capitalization-limited Grandeur Peak funds.

Grandeur Peak was approached by a large investor who recognized the fact that many of those now-larger stocks were still fundamentally attractive, and asked about the prospect of a couple “alumni” funds to hold them. Such funds are attractive to advisors since you’re able to accommodate a much larger asset base when you’re investing in $10 billion stocks than in $200 million ones.

One investor reaction might be to label Grandeur Peak as sell-outs. They’ve loudly touted two virtues: a laser-like focus and a firm-wide capacity cap at $3 billion, total. With the launch of the Stalwarts funds, they’re suddenly in the mid-cap business and are imagining firmwide AUM of about $10 billion.

Grandeur Peak, however, provided a remarkable wide-ranging, thoughtful defense of their decision. In a letter to investors, dated July 15, they discuss the rationale for and strategies embodied by three new funds:

Grandeur Peak Global Micro Cap Fund (GPMCX): A micro-cap strategy primarily targeting companies in the $50M-350M market cap range across the globe; very limited capacity.

Grandeur Peak Global Stalwarts Fund (GGSOX/GGSYX): A small/mid-cap (SMID) strategy focused on companies above $1.5B market cap across the globe.

Grandeur Peak International Stalwarts Fund (GISOX/GISYX): A small/mid-cap strategy focused on companies above $1.5B market cap outside of the U.S.

They argue that they’d always imagined Stalwarts funds, but didn’t imagine launching them until the firm’s second decade of operation. Their success in identifying outstanding stocks and drawing assets brought high returns, a lot of attention and a lot of money. While they hoped to be able to soft-close their funds, controlling inflows forced a series of hard closes instead which left some of their long-time clients adrift. By adding the Stalwarts funds as dedicated vehicles for larger cap names (the firm already owns over 100 stocks in the over $1.5 billion category), they’re able to provide continuing access to their investors without compromising the hard limits on the micro- and nano-cap products. Here’s their detail:

As you know, capacity is a very important topic to us. We believe managing capacity appropriately is another critical competitive advantage for Grandeur Peak. We plan to initially close the Global Micro Cap Fund at around $25 million. We intend to keep it very small in order to allow the Fund full access to micro and nanocap companies …

Looking carefully at the market cap and liquidity of our holdings above $1.5 billion in market cap, the math suggests that we could manage up to roughly $7 billion across the Stalwarts family without sacrificing our investment strategy or desired position sizes in these names. This $7 billion is in addition to the roughly $3 billion that we believe we can comfortably manage below $1.5 billion in market cap.

Our existing strategies will remain hard closed as we are committed to protecting these strategies and their ability to invest in micro-cap and small-cap companies. We are very aware that many good small cap firms lose their edge by taking in too many assets and being forced to adjust their investment style. We will not do this! We are taking a more unique approach by partitioning the lower capacity, less liquid names and allowing additional assets in the higher capacity, liquid stocks where the impact will not be felt by the smaller-cap funds.

The minimum initial investment is $2000 for the Investor share class, which will be waived if you establish the account with an automatic investment plan. Unlike Global Micro Cap, there is no waiver of the institutional minimum available for the Stalwarts. Each fund will charge 1.35%, retail, after waivers. You might want to visit the Global Stalwarts or International Stalwarts homepages for details.

Funds in Registration

There are 17 new funds in registration this month. Funds in registration with the SEC are not available for sale to the public and the advisors are not permitted to talk about them, but a careful reading of the filed prospectuses gives you a good idea of what interesting (and occasionally appalling) options are in the pipeline. Funds currently in registration will generally be available for purchase in November.

Two of the funds will not be available for direct purchase: T. Rowe Price is launching Mid Cap and Small Cap index funds to use with 529 plans, funds-of-funds and so on. Of the others, there are new offerings from two solid boutiques: Driehaus Turnaround Opportunities will target “distressed” investing and Brown Advisory Equity Long/Short Fund will do about what you expect except that the filings bracket the phrase Equity Long/Short. That suggests that the fund’s final name might be different. Harbor is launching a clone of Vanguard Global Equity. A little firm named Gripman is launched a conservative allocation fund (I wish them well) and just one of the funds made my eyes roll. You’ll figure it out.

Manager Changes

We tracked down 60 or 70 manager changes this month; the exact number is imprecise because one dude was leaving a couple dozen Voya funds which we reduced to just a single entry. We were struck by the fact that about a dozen funds lost women from the management teams, but it appears only two funds added a female manager.

Sympathies to Michael Lippert, who is taking a leave from managing Baron Opportunity (BIOPX) while he recovers from injuries sustained in a serious bicycle accident. We wish him a speedy recovery.

Updates

A slightly-goofed SEC filing led us to erroneously report last month that Osterweis Strategic Investment (OSTVX) might invest up to 100% in international fixed-income. A “prospectus sticker” now clarifies the fact that “at the fund level OSTVX is limited to 50% foreign.” Thanks to the folks at Osterweis for sharing the update with us. Regrets for any confusion.

Morningstar giveth: In mid-August, Morningstar initiated coverage of two teams we’ve written about. Vanguard Global Minimum Volatility (VMVFX) received a Bronze rating, mostly because it’s a Vanguard fund. Morningstar praises the low expenses, Vanguard culture and the “highly regarded–and generally successful–quantitative equity group.” The fund’s not quite two years old but has a solid record and has attracted $1.1 billion in assets.

Vulcan Value Partners (VVPLX) was the other Bronze honoree. Sadly, Morningstar waited until after the fund had closed before recognizing it. The equally excellent Vulcan Value Partners Small Cap (VVPSX) fund is also closed, though Morningstar has declined to recognize it as a medalist fund.

Morningstar taketh away: Fidelity Capital Appreciation (FDCAX) is no longer a Fanny Fifty Fund: it has been doing too well. There’s an incentive fee built into the fund’s price structure; if performance sucks, the e.r. drops. If performance soars, the e.r. rises.

Rewarding good performance sounds to the novice like a good idea. Nonetheless, good performance has had the effect of disqualifying FDCAX as a “Fantastic” fund. Laura Lutton explains why, in “These Formerly ‘Fantastic’ Funds Now Miss the Mark.”

In 2013, the fund outpaced that index by 2.47 percentage points, upping the expense ratio by 4 basis points to 0.81%. This increase moved the fund’s expenses beyond the category’s cheapest quintile…

Uhhh … yup. 247 basis points of excess return in exchange for 4 basis points of expense is clearly not what we expect of Fantastic funds. Out!

From Ira’s “What the hell is that?” file: A rare T Rowe flub

Ira Artman, a long-time friend of the Observer and consistently perceptive observer himself, shared the following WTF performance chart from T. Rowe Price:

Good news: T. Rowe Price Latin America (PRLAX) is magic! It’s volatility-free emerging market fund.

Bad news: the chart is rigged. The vertical axis is compressed so eliminate virtually all visible volatility. There’s a sparky discussion of the chart on our discussion board that provides both uncompressed versions of the chart and the note that the other T. Rowe funds did not receive similarly scaled axes. Consensus on the board: someone deserves a spanking for this one.

Thanks to Ira for catching and sharing.

Briefly Noted . . .

CRM Global Opportunity Fund (CRMWX) is becoming CRM Slightly-Less-Global Opportunity Fund, in composition if not in name. Effective October 28, the fund is changing its principal investment strategy from investing “a majority” of its assets outside the US to investing “at least 40%” internationally, less if markets get ugly. Given that the fund’s portfolio is just 39% global now (per Morningstar), I’m a little fuzzy on why the change will make a difference.

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

Seafarer’s share class model is becoming more common, which is a good thing. Seafarer, like other independent funds, needs to be available on brokerage platforms like Schwab and Scottrade; those platforms allow for lower cost institutional shares so long as the minimum exceeds $100,000 and higher cost retail shares with baked-in 12(b)1 fees to help pay Schwab’s platform fees. Seafarer complied but allows a loophole: they’ll waive the minimum on the institutional shares if you (a) buy it directly from them and (b) set up an automatic investing plan so that you’re moving toward the $100,000 minimum. Whether or not you reach it isn’t the consideration. Seafarer’s preference is to think of their low-cost institutional class as their “universal share class.”

Grandeur Peak is following suit. They intend to launch their new Global Micro Cap Fund by year’s end, then to close it as soon as assets hit $25 million. That raises the real prospect of the fund being available for a day or two. During that time, though, they’ll offer institutional shares to retail investors who invest directly with them. They write:

We want the Global Micro Cap Fund to be available to both our retail and institutional clients, but without the 0.25% 12b-1 fee that comes with the Investor share class. Our intention is to make the Institutional class available to all investors, and waive the minimum to $2000 for regular accounts and $100 for UTMA accounts.

Invesco International Small Company Fund will reopen to all investors on September 11, 2015. Morningstar has a lot of confidence in it (the fund is “Silver”) and it has a slender asset base right now, $330 million, down from its peak of $700 million before the financial crisis. The fund has been badly out of step with the market in recent years, which is reflected in the fact that it has one of its peer group’s best ten-year record and worst five-year records. Since neither the team nor the strategy has changed, Morningstar remains sanguine.

Matthews Pacific Tiger Fund (MAPTX) has reopened to new investors.

Effective July 1, 2015 the shareholder servicing fee for the Investor Class Shares of each of the Meridian Funds was reduced from 0.25% to 0.05%. Somehow I missed it. Sorry for the late notice. The Investor shares continue to sport their bizarre $99,999 minimum initial investment.

Wells Fargo Advantage Index Fund (WFILX) reopens to new investors on October 1. It’s an over-priced S&P 500 Index fund. Assuming you can dodge the front load, the 0.56% expense ratio is a bit more than triple Vanguard’s (0.17% for Investor shares of Vanguard 500, VFINX). That difference adds up: over 10 years, a $10,000 investment in WFILX would have grown to $19,800 while the same money in VFINX grew to $20,700.

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Acadian Emerging Markets (AEMGX) is slated to close to new investors on October 1. The adviser is afraid that the fund’s ability to execute its strategy will be impaired “if the size of the Fund is not limited.” The fund has lost an average of 3.7% annually for the current market cycle, through July 2015. You’d almost think that losing money, trailing the benchmark and having higher-than-normal volatility would serve as automatic brakes limiting the size of the portfolio.” Apparently not so much.

M.D. Sass 1-3 Year Duration U.S. Agency Bond Fund (MDSHX) is closing the fund’s retail share class and converting them to institutional shares. It’s an okay fund in a low return category, which means expenses matter. Over the past three years, the retail shares trail 60% of their peer group while the institutional shares lead 60% of the group. The conversion will give existing retail shareholders a bit of a boost and likely cut the adviser’s expenses by a bit.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

Effective August 27, 2015 361 Global Managed Futures Strategy Fund (AGFQX) became the 361 Global Counter-Trend Fund. I wish them well, but the new prospectus language is redolent of magic wands and sparkly dust: “counter-trend strategy follows an investment model designed to perform in volatile markets, regardless of direction, by taking advantage of fluctuations.  Using a combination of market inputs, the model systematically identifies when to purchase and sell specific investments for the Fund.” What does that mean? What fund isn’t looking to identify when to buy or sell specific investments?

American Independence Laffer Dividend Growth Fund (LDGAX) has … laughed its last laff? Hmmm. Two year old fund run by Laffer Investments, brainchild of Arthur B. Laffer, the genius behind supply-side economics. Not, as it turns out, a very good two year old fund.  At the end of July, American Independence merged with FolioMetrix LLC to form RiskX Investments. Somewhere in the process, the fund was declared to be surplus.

Effective September 1, 2015, the name of the Anchor Alternative Income Fund (AAIFX) will be changed to Armor Alternative Income Fund.

Effective August 7, 2015, Eaton Vance Tax-Managed Small-Cap Value Fund became Eaton Vance Tax-Managed Global Small-Cap Fund (ESVAX).

The Hartford Emerging Markets Research Fund is now Hartford Emerging Markets Equity Fund (HERAX) while The Hartford Small/Mid Cap Equity Fund has become Hartford Small Cap Core Fund (HSMAX).  HERAX is sub-advised by Wellington. Back in May they switched out managers, with the new guy bringing a more-driven approach so they’ve also added “quantitative investing” as a risk factor in the prospectus.  For HSMAX, midcaps are now out.

In mid-November, three Stratton funds add “Sterling Capital” to their names: Stratton Mid Cap Value (STRGX) becomes Sterling Capital Stratton Mid Cap Value. Stratton Real Estate (STMDX) and Stratton Small Cap Value (STSCX) get the same additions.

Effective September 17, 2015, ROBO-STOX^TM Global Robotics and Automation Index ETF (ROBO) will be renamed ROBO Global^TM Robotics and Automation Index ETF. If this announcement affects your portfolio, consider getting therapy and a Lab puppy.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

American Beacon is pretty much cleaning out the closet. They’ve announced liquidation of their S&P 500 Index Fund, Small Cap Index Fund, International Equity Index Fund, Emerging Markets Fund, High Yield Bond Fund, Intermediate Bond Fund, Short-Term Bond Fund and Zebra Global Equity Fund (AZLAX). With regard to everything except Zebra, the announcement speaks of “large redemptions which are expected to occur by the end of 2015” that would shrink the funds by so much that they’re not economically viable. American Beacon started as the retirement plan for American Airlines, was sold to one private equity firm in 2008 and then sold again in 2015. It appears that they lost the contract for running a major retirement plan and are dumping most of their vanilla funds in favor of their recent ventures into trendier fare. The Zebra Global Equity Fund was a perfectly respectable global equity fund that drew just $5 million in assets.

In case you’re wondering whatever happened to the Ave Maria Opportunity Fund, it was eaten by the Ave Maria Catholic Values Fund (AVEMX) at the end of July.

Eaton Vance announced liquidation of its U.S. Government Money Market Fund, around about Halloween, 2015. As new SEC money market regs kick in, we’ve seen a lot of MMFs liquidate.  

Eaton Vance Hexavest U.S. Equity Fund (EHUAX) is promoted to the rank of Former Fund on or about September 18, 2015, immediately after they pass their third anniversary.  What is a “hexavest,” you ask? Perhaps a protective garment donned before entering the magical realms of investing? Hmmm … haven’t visited WoW lately, so maybe. Quite beyond that it’s an institutional equity investment firm based in Montreal that subadvises four (oops, three) funds for Eaton Vance.  Likely the name derived from the fact that the firm had six founders (Greek, “hex”) who wore vests.

Rather more quickly, Eaton Vance also liquidated Parametric Balanced Risk Fund (EAPBX). The Board announced the liquidation on August 11; it was carried out August 28. And you could still say they might have been a little slow on the trigger:

The Eudora Fund (EUDFX) has closed and will liquidate on September 10, 2015.

Hundredfold Select Equity Fund (SFEOX) has closed and will discontinue its operations effective October 30, 2015. It’s the sort of closure about which I think too much. On the one hand, the manager (described on the firm’s Linked-In page as “an industry visionary”) is a good steward: almost all of the money in the fund is his own (over $1 million of $1.8 million), he doesn’t get paid to manage it, his Simply Distribute Foundation helps fund children’s hospitals and build orphanages. On the other hand, it’s a market-timing fund of funds will an 1100% turnover which has led the fund to consistently capture much more of the downside, and much less of the upside, than its peers. And, in a slightly disingenuous move, the Hundredfold Select website has already been edited to hide the fact that the Select Equity fund even exists.

Ticker symbols are sometimes useful time capsules, helping you unpack a fund’s evolution. Matthews Asian Growth and Income is “MACSX” because it once was their Asian Convertible Securities fund. Hundredfold Select is “SFEOX” because it once was the Direxion Spectrum Funds: Equity Opportunity fund.

KKM Armor Fund (RMRAX) was not, it appears, bullet-proof. Despite a 30% gain in August 2015, the 18 month old, $8 million fund has closed and will liquidate on September 24, 2015. RMRAX was one of only two mutual funds in the “volatility” peer group. The other is Navigator Sentry Managed Volatility (NVXAX). I bet you’re wondering, “why on earth would Morningstar create a bizarre little peer group with only two funds?” The answer is that there are a slug of ETFs that allow you to bet changes in the level of market volatility; they comprise the remainder of the group. That also illustrates why I prefer funds to ETFs: encouraging folks to speculate on volatility changes is a fool’s errand.

The Modern Technology Fund (BELAX) has closed and will liquidate on September 25, 2015.

There’s going to be one less BRIC in the wall: Goldman Sachs has announced plans to merge Goldman Sachs BRIC Fund (GBRAX) into their Emerging Markets Equity Fund (GEMAX) sometime in October.  The Trustees unearthed a new euphemism for “burying this dog.” They want “to optimize the Goldman Sachs Funds.” The optimized line-up removes a fund that, over the past five years, turned $10,000 into $8,500 by moving its assets into a fund that turned $10,000 into $10,000.

In an interesting choice of words, the Board of Directors authorized the “winding down” Keeley Alternative Value Fund (KALVX) and the Keeley International Small Cap Value Fund (KISVX). By the time you read this, the funds will already have been quite unwound. The advisor gave Alternative Value about four years to prove its … uhh, alternative value (it couldn’t). It gave International Small Cap all of eight months. Founder John Keeley passed away in June at age 75. The firm had completed their transition planning just a month before his passing.

PIMCO Tax Managed Real Return Fund (PXMDX) will be liquidated on or about October 30, 2015.  In addition, three PIMCO ETFs are getting deposited in the circular file: 3-7 Year U.S. Treasury Index (FIVZ), 7-15 Year U.S. Treasury Index (TENZ) and Foreign Currency Strategy Active (FORX) ETFs all disappear on September 30, 2015. “This date may be changed without notice at the discretion of the Trust’s officers.” Their average daily trading volume was just a thousand or two shares.

Ramius Hedged Alpha Fund (RDRAX) will undergo “termination, liquidation and dissolution,” all on September 4, 2015.

A reminder to all muddled Lutherans: your former Aid Association for Lutherans (AAL) Funds and/or your former Lutheran Brother Funds, which merged to become your Thrivent Funds, aren’t exactly thriving. The latest evidence is the decision to merge Small Value and Small Growth into Thrivent Small Cap, Mid Cap Value and Mid Cap Growth into Thrivent Mid Cap Stock and Natural Resources and Technology into Thrivent Large Cap Growth

Toroso Newfound Tactical Allocation Fund (TNTAX) has closed and will liquidate at the end of September, 2015.  The promise of riches driven by “a proprietary, volatility-adjusted and momentum driven model” never quite panned out for this tiny fund-of-ETFs.

In Closing . . .

Warren Buffett turned 85 on Sunday. I can only hope that we all have his wits and vigor when we reach a similar point in our lives. To avoid copyright infringement and the risk of making folks ears bleed, I didn’t sing “happy birthday” but I celebrate his life and legacy.

As you read this, I’m boring at bunch of nice folks in Cincinnati to tears. I was asked to chat with the folks at the Ultimus Fund Services conference about growth in uncertain times. It’s a valid concern and I’ll try to share in October the gist of the argument. In late August, a bright former student of mine, Jonathon Woo, had me visit with some of his colleagues in the mutual fund research group at Edward Jones. I won’t tell you what I said to them (it was all Q&A and I rambled) but what I should have said about how to learn (in this case about the prospect of an individual mutual fund) from talking with others. And, if the market doesn’t scramble things up again, we’ll finally run the stuff that’s been in the pipeline for two months.

We’re grateful to the folks who continue to support the Observer, both financially and with an ongoing stream of suggestions. Thanks to Tyler for his recent advice, and to Rick, Kirk, William, Beatrice, Courtney, Thaddeus, Kevin, Virginia, Sunil, and Ira (a donor advised fund – that’s so cool) for their financial support. You guys rock! A number of planning firms have also reaching out with support, kind words and suggestions. So thanks to Wealth Care, LLC, Evergreen Asset Management, and Integrity Financial Planning.  I especially need to track down our friends at Evergreen Asset Management for some beta testing questions. Too, we can’t forget the folks whose support comes from the use of our Amazon Affiliate link. Way to go on finding those back-to-school supplies!

I don’t mean to frighten anyone before Halloween, but historically September and October are the year’s most volatile months. Take a deep breath, try to do a little constructive planning on quiet days, pray for the Cubs (as I write, they’re in third place but with a record that would have them leading four of the six MLB divisions), cheer for the Pirates, laugh at the dinner table and remember that we’re thinking of you.

As ever,

Dear friends,

We really hope you enjoy the extra start-of-summer profundity that we’ve larded (excuse the expression) into this issue. We took advantage of the extra time afforded by the June 30^th leap second and the extra light generated that night by the once-in-two-millennia conjunction of Venus and Jupiter to squeeze in a family-sized portion of insight into this month’s issue.

And it all started with Morningstar.

Mania at the McCormick!

Morningstar’s annual investor conference is always a bit of a zoo. Two thousand people jam together in a building the size of a shopping mall, driven by a long schedule and alternating doses of caffeine (6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.) and alcohol (thereafter). There are some dozens of presentations, ranging from enormously provocative to freakish, mostly by folks who have something to sell but, for the sake of decorum, are trying not to mention that fact.

Okay: the damned thing’s a lot bigger than any shopping mall except the Mall of America. MoA has about 4.2 million square feet total, McCormick is around 3.4 million. We were in the West Building, whose main ballroom alone runs to 100,000 square feet. 500,000 square feet of exhibition space, 250,000 of meeting space, with something like 60 meeting rooms. That building alone cost about $900 million, and McCormick has three others.

What follows are three sets of idiosyncratic observations: mine, Charles and Ed’s. I’ve linked to Morningstar’s video, where available. The key is that their videos auto-launch, which can be mightily annoying. Be ready for it.

Jeremy Grantham: The World Will End, You’ve Just Got to be Patient for a Bit

Grantham, one of the cofounders of GMO, a highly respected institutional investment firm originally named Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo, is regularly caricatured as a perma-bear. He responds to the charge by asserting “I’m not a pessimist. You’re simply optimists.”

Grantham argues that we’re heading for a massive stock market crash (something on the order of a 60% fall), just not for a while yet. GMO’s study of asset bubbles found that asset prices regularly become detached from reality but they’re not subject to crashing until they exceed their normal levels by about two standard deviations.  Roughly speaking, that translates to asset prices that are higher than they are 95% of the time. Right now, we’re about 1.5 standard deviations above average. If current trends continue – and Grantham does expect stocks to follow the path of least resistance, higher – then we’ll reach the two standard deviation mark around the time of the presidential election.

Merely being wildly overvalued doesn’t automatically trigger a crash (in the UK, home prices reached a three standard deviation peak – 99.7% – before imploding) but it’s extremely rare for such a market not to find a reason to crash. And when the crash comes, the market typically falls at about twice the rate that it rose.

As an aside, Grantham also notes that no stock market crash has occurred until after average investors have been dragged into the party’s frenzied last hours, too late to make much money but just in time to have their portfolios gutted (again). While optimism, measured by various investor attitude surveys, is high, it’s not manic. Yet.

So, we’ve got a bit to savor ill-garnered gains and to reassure ourselves that this time we’ll be sharp, discerning and well on our way to safety ere the crash occurs.

Oddly, Grantham expects a crash because capitalism does work, but regulation (mostly) does not. Under capitalism, capital flows to the area of greatest opportunity: if your lemonade stand is able to draw a million in revenue today, you can be pretty much guaranteed that there will be a dozen really cool lemonade stands in your neighborhood within the week. As a result, your profit will decline. More stands will be built, and profits will continue declining, until capitalists conclude that there’s nothing special in the lemonade stand biz and they resume the search for great opportunities. Today’s record corporate profit margins must draw new competitors in to drive those excess profits down, or capitalism is failing.

Grantham argues that capitalism is failing for now. He blames the rise of “stock option culture” and a complicit U.S. fed for the problem. Up to 80% of executive compensation now flows from stock options, which are tied to short-term performance of a company’s stock rather than long-term performance of the company. People respond to the incentives they’re given, so managers tend toward those actions which increase the value of their stock options. Investing in the company is slow, uncertain and risky, and so capital expenditures (“capex”) by publicly-traded firms is falling. Buying back stock (overpriced or not) and issuing dividends is quick, clean and safe, and so that sort of financial engineering expands. Interest rates at or near zero even encourage the issuance of debt to fund buybacks (“Peter, meet Paul”). It would be possible to constrain the exercise of options, but we choose not to. And so firms are not moving capital into new ventures or into improving existing capabilities which, in the short run, continues to underwrite record profit margins.

David Marcus: We’re in the Bottom of the Third

All value investing starts with fundamentally, sometimes appallingly, screwed-up companies that have the potential to do vastly better than they’ve been doing. The question is whether anything will unleash those potential gains. That’s not automatically true; 50 to a hundred publicly-traded companies go bankrupt each year as do something like 30,000 private ones.

On whole, investors would prefer that the firms they invest in not go belly up. In the U.S., they’ve got great leverage to encourage corporate restructurings – spinoffs, mergers, acquisitions, division closures – which might serve to release that locked-up potential. We also have a culture that, for better and worse, endorses the notion of maximizing shareholder (rather than stakeholder or community) value.

Traditionally the U.S. has been one of the few places that countenanced, much less encouraged, frequent corporate dislocations. Europeans encourage a stakeholder model focused on workers’ interests and Asians have a tradition of intricately interwoven corporate interests where corporations share a web of directorships and reciprocal investments in each other.

David Marcus manages Evermore Global Value (EVGBX) and tries to do so in the spirit of his mentor, Michael Price. As one of Price’s Mutual Series managers, he specialized in “special situations” investing, a term that describes the whole array of “rotten company teetering between damnation and salvation” thing. Later, as a private investor in Europe, he saw the beginnings of a change in corporate culture; the first intimations that European managers were willing to make tentative moves toward a shareholder-focused culture. In December 2009, he launched the Evermore funds to exploit that unrecognized change.

The first three years were trying: his flagship fund lost 10% over the period and trailed 95% of its peers. When we spoke several years ago, Mr. Marcus was frustrated but patient: he likened his portfolio to a spring that’s already been compressed a lot but, instead of releasing, was getting compressed even more. In the past three years, the spring rebounded: top third relative returns, 15% annualized ones, with two stretches at the very top of the global equity heap.

Mr. Marcus’s portfolio remains Euro-centric, about 66% against his peers’ 30%, but he foresees a rotation. The 2008 financial meltdown provided an opportunity for European corporate insiders to pursue a reform agenda. International members started appearing on corporate boards, for instance, and managers were given leeway to begin reducing inefficiency. ThyssenKrupp AG, a German conglomerate, had 27 separate IT departments operating with inconsistent policies and often incompatible software. They’ve whittled that down to five and are pursuing the crazy dream of just one IT department. Such moves create a certain momentum: at first, restructuring seems impossible, then a minor restructuring frees up a billion in capital and managers begin to imagine additional work that might reap another billion and a half. As the great Everett Dirksen once reflected, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Mr. Marcus believes that Europeans are pursuing such reforms with greater vigor but without wasting capital “on crappy IPOs” that continue to dog the U.S. market.

A bigger change might be afoot in Asia and, in particular, in Japan. Corporate executives are, for the first time, beginning to unwind the complex web of cross-ownership which had traditionally been a one-way move: you invest in another corporation but never, ever sell your stake. Increasingly, managers see those investments as “cash cows,” the source of additional capital that might be put to better use.

Ironically, the same social forces that once held capital captive might now be working to free it. Several new Japanese stock indexes attempt to recognize firms that are good stewards of shareholder capital. The most visible is the Nikkei 400 ROE index, which tracks companies “with high appeal for investors, which meet requirements of global investment standards, such as efficient use of capital and investor-focused management perspectives.” Failure to qualify for inclusion has been deeply embarrassing for some management teams, which subsequently reoriented their capital allocations. Nomura Securities launched a competing index focusing on companies that use dormant cash to repurchase shares, though the effects of that are not yet known.

Mr. Marcus’s sense that the ground might be shifting is shared by several outstanding managers. Andrew Foster of Seafarer (SFGIX) has speculated that conditions favorable to value investing (primarily institutions that might serve as catalysts to unlock value) are evolving in the emerging markets. Messrs. Lee and Richyal at JOHCM International Select Fund (JOHAX) have directly invoked the significance of the Nikkei ROE Index in their Japan investing. Ralf Scherschmidt at Oberweis International Opportunities (OBIOX) has made a career of noticing that investors fail to react promptly to such changes; he tries to react to news promptly then wait patiently for others to begin believing that change is really. All three are five-star funds.

I’ll continue my reviews in August. For now, here are Charles’s quick takes.

Morningstar Investment Conference 2015 Notes

In contrast to the perfect pre-autumnal weather of last year’s ETF conference, Chicago was hot and muggy this past week, where some 2000 attendees gathered for Morningstar’s Investment Conference located at the massive, sprawling, and remote McCormick Place.

Morningstar does a great job of quickly publishing conference highlights and greatly facilitates press … large press room wired with high-speed internet, ample snacks and hot coffee, as well as adjacent media center where financial reporters can record fund managers and speakers then quickly post perspectives, like Chuck Jaffe’s good series of audio interviews.

On the MFO Discussion Board, David attempts to post nightly his impressions and linkster Ted relays newly published conference articles. To say the event is well covered would be a colossal understatement.

Nonetheless, some impressions for inclusion in this month’s commentary …

If you are a financial adviser not catering to women and millennials, your days are numbered.

On women. Per Sallie Krawcheck, former president of BAC’s Global Wealth division and currently chair of the Ellevate network, which is dedicated to economic engagement of women worldwide, women live six to eight years longer than men … 80% of men die married, while 80% of women die unmarried … 70% of widows leave their financial advisers within a year of their husband’s death.

While women will soon account for majority of US millionaires, most financials advisors don’t include spouses in the conversation. The issue extends to the buy side as well. In a pre-conference session entitled, “Do Women Investors Behave Differently Than Men,” panels cited that women control 51% investable wealth and currently account for 47% of high net worth individuals, yet professional women money managers account for only 5% of assets under management. How can that be?

The consequence of this lack of inclusion is “lack of diversification, higher risk, and money left on table.” Women, they state, value wealth preservation many times more than men. One panelist actually argues that women are better suited to handle the stress hormone cortisol since they need not suffer adverse consequences of interaction with testosterone.

While never said explicitly, I could not help but wonder if the message or perhaps question here is: If women played a greater role in financial institutions and at the Fed in years leading up to 2007, would we have avoided the financial or housing crises?  

On millennials. Per Joel Brukenstein of Financial Planning Magazine and creator of Technology Tools for Today website, explains that the days of financial advisors charging 1% annual fee for maintaining a client portfolios of four or five mutual funds are no longer sustainable … replaced with a proliferation of robo-advisors, like Schwab Intelligent Portfolios, which charges “no advisory fees, no account service fees, no commissions, period.”

Ditto, if your services are not available on a smart phone. Millennials are beyond internet savvy and mobile … all data/tools must be accessible via the cloud.

Mr. Brukenstein went so far as to suggest that financial advisors not offering services beyond portfolio management should consider exiting the business.

Keynote highlights. Jeremy Grantham, British-born co-founder of Boston-based asset management firm GMO, once again reiterated his belief that US stocks are 30 – 60% overvalued, still paying for overvaluation sins of our fathers … the great bull run of 1990, which started in 1987, finished in 2000, and was right on the heels of the great bull run of the 1980s. No matter that investors have suffered two 50% drawdowns the past 15 years with the S&P 500 and only received anemic returns, “it will take 25 years to get things right again.” So, 10 more years of suffering I’m afraid.

He blames Greenspan, Bernanke, and Yellen for distorting valuations, the capital markets, the zero interest rate policy … leading to artificially inflated equity prices and a stock-option culture that has resulted in making leaders of publically traded companies wealthy at the expense of capital investment, which would benefit the many. “No longer any room for city or community altruism in today’s capitalism … FDR’s social contract no more.”

All that said he does not see the equity bubble popping just yet … “no bubble peaks before abnormal buyers and deals come to market.” He predicts steady raise until perhaps coming presidential election.

Mr. Grantham is not a believer in efficient market theory. He views the cycles of equity expansion and contraction quite inefficiently driven by career risk (never be wrong on your own …), herding, momentum, extrapolation, excursions from replacement value, then finally, arbitrage and mean reversion at expense of client patience. Round and round it goes.

David Kelly, JP Morgan’s Chief Global Strategist whose quarterly “Guide To Markets” now reaches 169 thousand individuals in 25 countries, also does not see a bear market on horizon, which he believes would be triggered by one or more of these four events/conditions: recession, commodity spike, aggressive fed tightening, and/or extreme valuation. He sees none of these.

He sees current situation in Greece as a tragedy … Germany was too tough during recession. Fortunately, 80% of Greek debt is held by ECB, not Euro banks, so he sees no lasting domino effect if it defaults.

On the US economy, he sees it “not booming, but bouncing back.” Seven years into recovery, which represents the fourth longest expansion dating back to 1900. “Like a Yankees/Red Sox game … long because it is slow.”

He disputes Yellen’s position that there is slack in the economy, citing that last year 60 million people were hired … an extraordinary amount. (That is the gross number; subtract 57 million jobs left, for a net of 3 million.) The biggest threat to continued expansion is lack of labor force, given retiring baby boomers, 12.5% of population with felony convictions, scores addicted to drug, and restrictions on foreign nationals, which he calls the biggest tragedy: “We bring them in. They want to be here. We educate them. They are top of class. Then, we send them home. It’s crazy. We need immigration reform to allow skilled workers to stay.”

Like Grantham, he does see QE helping too much of the wrong thing at this point: “Fertilizer for weeds.”

On oil, which he views like potatoes – a classic commodity: “$110 is too much, but $40 is too low.” Since we have “genetically evolved to waste oil,” he believes now is good time to get in cause “prices have stabilized and will gradually go up.”

Like last fall, he continues to see EM cheap and good long term opportunity. Europe valuations ok … a mid-term opportunity.

He closed by reminding us that investors need courage during bear markets and brains during bull markets.

Breakout sessions. Wasatch’s Laura Geritz was stand-out panelist in break-out session “Are Frontier Markets Worth Pursuing?” She articulates her likes (“Active manager’s dream asset class … capital held dear by phenomenal FM management teams … investments by strong subsidiaries, like Nestle … China’s investment in FM … ”) and dislikes (“No practical index … current indices remain too correlated due to lack of diversification … lack of market liquidity …”). She views FM as strictly long-term investment proposition with lots of ups and downs, but ultimately compelling. If you have not listened to her interview with Chuck Jaffe, you should.

Another break-out session, panelists discussed the current increasing popularity of “ESG Investing.” (ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance. ESG funds, currently numbering more than 200, apply these criteria in their investments.) “Ignore increasingly at your own peril … especially given that women and millennials represent the biggest demographic on horizon.” Interestingly, data suggest such funds do just as well if not slightly better than the overall market.

Lengthening Noses

By Edward Studzinski

“A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

So the annual Morningstar Conference has come and gone again, with couple thousand attendees in town hoping to receive the benefit of some bit of investment or business wisdom. The theme of this year’s conference appears to have been that the world of investors now increasingly is populated by and belongs to “Gen X’ers” and “Millennials.” Baby Boomers such as yours truly, are a thing of the past in terms of influence as well as a group from whom assets are to be gathered. Indeed, according to my colleagues, advisors should be focused not on the current decision maker in a client family but rather the spouse (who statistically should outlive) or the children. And their process of decision making will most likely be very different than that of the patriarch. We can see that now, in terms of how they desire to communicate, which is increasingly less by the written word or in face to face meetings.

In year’s past, the conference had the flavor of being an investment conference. Now it has taken on the appearance of a marketing and asset allocation advice event. Many a person told me that they do not come to attend the conference and hear the speakers. Rather, they come because they have conveniently assembled in one place a large number of individuals that they have been interested either in meeting or catching up with. My friend Charles’ observation was that it was a conference of “suits” and “skirts” in the Exhibitors’ Hall. Unfortunately I have the benefit of these observations only second and third hand, as for the first part of the week I was in Massachusetts and did not get back to Chicago until late Wednesday evening. And while I could have made my way to events on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, I have found it increasingly difficult to take the whole thing seriously as an investment information event (although it is obviously a tremendous cash cow for Morningstar). Given the tremendous success of the conference year in and year out, one increasingly wonders what the correct valuation metric is to be applied to Morningstar equity. Is it the Google of the investment and financial services world? Nonetheless, given the focus of many of the attendees on the highest margin opportunities in the investment business and the way to sustain an investment management franchise, I wonder if, notwithstanding how she said it, whether Senator Elizabeth Warren is correct when she says that “the game is rigged.”

Friday apparently saw two value-oriented investors in a small panel presenting and taking Q&A. One of those manages a fund with $20 Billion in assets, which is a larger amount of money than he historically has managed. Charging a 1% fee on that $20B, his firm is picking up $200 Million in revenue from that one fund alone, notwithstanding that they have other funds. Historically he has been more of a small-midcap manager, with a lot of special situations but not to worry, he’s finding lots of things to invest in, albeit with 40% or so in cash or cash equivalents. The other domestic manager runs two domestic funds as the lead manager, with slightly more than $24 Billion in assets, and for simplicity’s sake, let’s call it a blended rate of 90 basis points in fees. His firm is seeing than somewhat in excess of $216 Million in revenue from the two funds. Now let me point out that unless the assets collapse, these fees are recurring, so in five years, there has been a billion dollars in revenue generated at each firm, more than enough to purchase several yachts. The problem I have with this is it is not a serious discussion of the world we are in at present. Valuation metrics for stocks and bonds are at levels approaching if not beyond the two standard deviation warning bells. I suppose some of this is to be expected, as if is a rare manager who is going to tell you to keep your money. However, I would be hard pressed at this time if running a fund, to have it open. I am actually reminded of the situation where a friend sent me to her family’s restaurant in suburban Chicago, and her mother rattled off the specials of the evening, one of which was Bohemian style duck. I asked her to go ask the chef how the duck looked that night, and after a minute she came back and said, “Chef says the duck looks real good tonight.” At that point, one of the regulars at the bar started laughing and said, “What do you think? The chef’s going to say, oh, the duck looks like crap tonight?”

Now, if I could make a suggestion in Senator Warren’s ear, it would be that hearings should be held about what kind of compensation in the investment management field is excessive. When the dispersion between the lowest paid employee and the highest results in the highest compensated being paid two hundred times more than the lowest, it seems extreme. I suppose we will hear that not all of the compensation is compensation, but rather some reflects ownership and management responsibilities. The rub is that many times the so-called ownership interests are artificial or phantom.

It just strikes that this is an area ripe for reform, for something in the nature of an excess profits tax to be proposed. After all, nothing is really being created here that redounds to the benefit of the U.S. economy, or is creating jobs (and yes Virginia, carried interest for hedge funds as a tax advantage should also be eliminated).

We now face a world where the can increasingly looks like it cannot be kicked down the road financially for either Greece or Puerto Rico. And that doesn’t even consider the states like Illinois and Rhode Island that have serious underfunded pension issues, as well as crumbling infrastructures. So, I say again, there is a great deal of risk in the global financial system at present. One should focus, as an investor, in not putting any more at risk than one could afford to write off without compromising one’s standard of living. Low interest rates have done more harm than good, for both the U.S. economy and the global economy. And liquidity is increasingly a problem, especially in the fixed income markets but also in stocks. Be warned! Don’t be one of the investors who has caught the disease known as FOMO or “Fear of Missing Out.”

It’s finally easy being green

The most widely accepted solution to Americans’ “retirement crisis” – our lifelong refusal to forego the joy of stuff now in order to live comfortably later – is pursuing a second (or third or fifth) career after we’ve nominally retired. Some of us serve as school crossing guards, greeters, or directors of mutual fund boards, others as consultants, carpenters and writers. Honorable choices, all.

But what if you could make more money another way, by selling cigarettes directly to adolescents in poor countries?  There’s a booming market, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is working globally to be sure that folks keep smoking, and your customers do get addicted. A couple hours a day with a stand near a large elementary school or junior high and you’re golden.

Most of us would say “no.” Many of us would say “HELL NO.” The thought of imperiling the lives and health of others to prop up our own lifestyle just feels horribly wrong.

The question at hand, then, is “if you aren’t willing to participate directly in such actions, why are you willing to participate indirectly in them through your investments?” Your decision to invest in, for example, a tobacco company lowers their cost of capital, increases their financial strength and furthers their business. There’s no real dodging the fact: you become a part-owner of the corporation, underwrite its operations and expect to be well compensated for it.

And you are doing it. In the case of Phillip Morris International (PM), for example, 30% of the firm’s stock is owned by ten investment companies:

Capital World & Capital Research are the advisors to the American Funds. Barrow sub-advises funds for, among others, Vanguard and Touchstone.

That exercise can be repeated with a bunch of variations: what role would you like to play in The Sixth Great Extinction, the impending collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet, or the incineration of young people in footwear factories? In the past, many of us defaulted to one of two simple positions: I don’t have a choice or I can’t afford to be picky.

The days when socially-responsible investing was the domain of earnest clergy and tree-hugging professors are gone. How gone?  Here’s a quick quiz to help provide context: how many dollars are invested through socially-screened investment vehicles?

1. A few hundred million
2. A few billion
3. A few tens of billions
4. A few hundred billion
5. A few trillion
6. Just enough to form a really satisfying plug with which to muffle The Trump.

The answer is “E” (though I’d give credit, on principle, for “F”). ESG-screened investments now account for about one-sixth of all of the money invested in the U.S. —over $6.5 trillion— up by 76% since 2012. In the U.S. alone there are over 200 open-end funds and ETFs which apply some variety of environmental, social and governance screens on their investors’ behalf.

There are four reasons investors might have for pursuing, or avoiding, ESG-screened investments. They are, in brief:

1. It changes my returns. The traditional fear is that by imposing screening costs and limiting one’s investable universe, SRI funds were a financial drag on your portfolio. There have been over 1200 academic and professional studies published on the financial effects, and a dozen or so studies of the studies (called meta-analyses). The uniform conclusion of both academic and professional reviews is that SRI screens do not reduce portfolio returns. There’s some thin evidence of improved performance, but I wouldn’t invest based on that.
2. It changes my risk profile. The traditional hope is that responsible firms would be less subject to “headline risk” and less frequently involved in litigation, which might make them less risky investments. At least when examining SRI indexes, that’s not the case. TIAA-CREF examined a quarter century’s worth of volatility data for five widely used indexes (Calvert Social Index, Dow Jones Sustainability U.S. Index, FTSE4Good US Index, MSCI KLD 400 Social Index, and MSCI USA IMI ESG Index) and concluded that there were no systematic differences between ESG-screened indexes and “normal” ones.
3. It allows me to foster good in the world. The logic is simple: if people refuse to invest in a company, its cost of doing business rises, its products become less economically competitive and fewer people buy them. Conversely, if you give managers access to lots of capital, their cost of capital falls and they’re able to do more of whatever you want them to do. In some instances, called “impact investing,” you actually direct your manager to put money to work for the common ground through microfinance, underwriting housing construction in economically-challenged cities and so on.
4. It’s an expression of an important social value. In its simplest form, it’s captured by the phrase “I’m not giving my money to those bastards. Period.” Some critics of SRI have made convoluted arguments in favor of giving your money to the bastards on economic grounds and then giving other money to social causes or charities. The argument for investing in line with your beliefs seems to have resonated most strongly with Millennials (those born in the last two decades of the 20^th century) and with women. Huge majorities in both groups want to align their portfolio with their desires for a better world.

Our bottom line is this: you can invest honorably without weakening your future returns. There is no longer any credible doubt about it. The real problems you face are (1) sorting through the welter of funds which might impose both positive and negative screens on a conflicting collection of 20 different issues and (2) managing your investment costs.

We’ve screened our own data to help you get started. We divided funds into two groups: ESG Stalwarts, funds with long records and stable teams, and Most Intriguing New ESG Funds, those with shorter records, smaller asset bases and distinctly promising prospects. We derived those lists by looking for no-load options open to retail investors, then looking for folks with competitive returns, reasonable expenses and high Sharpe ratios over the full market cycle that began in October 2007.

In addition, we recommend that you consult the exceedingly cool, current table of SRI funds maintained by the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment. The table, which is sadly not sortable, provides current performance data and screening criteria for nearly 200 SRI funds. In addition, it has a series of clear, concise summaries of each fund on the table.

ESG Stalwarts

Most intriguing new ESG funds

In the wings, socially responsible funds still in registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission which will be available by early autumn include:

Thornburg Better World Fund will seek long-term capital growth. The plan is to invest in international “companies that demonstrate one or more positive environmental, social and governance characteristics.” Details in this month’s Funds in Registration feature.

TIAA-CREF Social Choice International Equity Fund will seek a favorable long-term total return, reflected in the performance of ESG-screened international stocks. MSCI will provide the ESG screens and the fund will target developed international markets. This fund, and the next, will be managed by Philip James (Jim) Campagna and Lei Liao. The managers’ previous experience seems mostly to be in index funds.

TIAA-CREF Social Choice Low Carbon Equity Fund will seek a favorable long-term total return, reflected in the performance of ESG-screened US stocks. MSCI will provide the ESG screens, which will be supplemented by screens looking for firms with “demonstrate leadership in managing and mitigating their current carbon emissions and (2) have limited exposure to oil, gas, and coal reserves.”

Trillium All Cap Fund will seek long term capital appreciation by investing in an all-cap portfolio of “stocks with high quality characteristics and strong environmental, social, and governance records.” Up to 20% of the portfolio might be overseas. The fund will be managed by Elizabeth Levy and Stephanie Leighton of Trillium Asset Management. Levy managed Winslow Green Large Cap from 2009-11, Leighton managed ESG money at SunLife of Canada and Pioneer.

Trillium Small/Mid Cap Fund will seek long term capital appreciation by investing in a portfolio of small- to mid-cap “stocks with high quality characteristics and strong environmental, social, and governance records.” Small- to mid- is defined as stocks comparable in size to those in the S&P 1000, a composite of the S&P’s small and mid-cap indexes. Up to 20% of the portfolio might be overseas. The fund will be managed by Laura McGonagle and Matthew Patsky of Trillium Asset Management. Trillium oversees about $2.2 billion in assets. McGonagle was previously a research analyst at Adams, Harkness and Hill and is distantly related to Professor Minerva McGonagall. Patsky was Director of Equity Research for Adams, Harkness & Hill and a manager of the Winslow Green Solutions Fund.

We, now more than ever in human history, have a chance to make a difference. Indeed, we can’t avoid making a difference, for good or ill. In our daily lives, that might translate to helping our religious community, coaching youth sports, serving meals at a center for the marginally secure or turning our backs on that ever-so-manly Cadillac urban assault vehicle, the Escalade.

That’s all inconvenient, a bit limiting and utterly right, and so we do it. ESG advocates argue that we’ve reached the point where we can do the same things with our portfolios: we can make a difference, encourage good behavior and affirm important personal values, all with little or no cost to ourselves. It seems like a deal worth considering.

The league’s top rebounders

Even the best funds decline in value during either a correction or a bear market. Indeed, many of the best decline more dramatically than their peers because the high conviction, high independence portfolios that are signs of their distinction also can leave them exposed when things turn bad. The disastrous performance of the Dodge & Cox funds during the 2007-09 crash is a case in point.

The real question isn’t “will it fall?” We know the answer. The real question is “will the fall be so bad that I’ll get stupid and insist on selling at a painful loss (again), probably just before a rebound?” Two rarely discussed statistics address that question. The first is recovery time, which simply measures the number of months that it’s taken each fund to recover from its single worst drawdown. The second is the Ulcer Index, one of Charles’s favorite metrics if only because of the name, which was designed by Peter Martin to factor–in both the depth and duration of a fund’s drawdown.

For those casting about for tummy-calming options, we screened for funds that had been around for a full market cycle, then looked at funds which have the shortest recovery times and, separately, the lowest Ulcer Indexes over the current market cycle. That cycle started in October 2007 when the broad market peaked and includes both the subsequent brutal crash and ferocious rebound. Our general sense is that looking at performance across such a cycle is better than focusing on some arbitrary number of years (e.g., 5, 10 or 15 year results).

The first table highlights the funds with the fastest rebounders in each of six popular categories.

The rebound or recovery time doesn’t directly account for the depth of the drawdown. It’s possible, after all, for an utterly nerve-wracking fund to power dive then immediately rocket skyward again, leaving your stomach and sleep behind.  The Ulcer Index figures that in: two funds might each dive, swoop and recover in two months but the one dove least earned a better (that is, lower) Ulcer Index score.

Again, these calculations are looking at performance over the course of the current market cycle only.

How much difference does paying attention to risk make? Fully half of all international large cap funds are still underwater; 83 months after the onset of the crash, they have still not made their investors whole. That roster includes all of the funds indexed to the MSCI EAFE, the main index of large cap stocks in the developed world, as well as actively-managed managed funds from BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Janus, JPMorgan and others.

In domestic large caps, both the median fund on the list and all major market index funds took 57 months to recover.

Bottom Line: the best time to prepare for the rain is while the sun is still shining. While you might not feel that a portfolio heavy on cash or short-term bonds meets your needs, it makes sense for you to investigate – within whatever asset classes you choose to pursue – funds likely to inflict only manageable amounts of pain. Metrics like recovery time and Ulcer Index should help guide those explorations.

FPA Perennial: Time to Go.

FPA Perennial (FPPFX) closed to new investors on June 15, 2015. The fund that re-opens to new investors at the beginning of October will bear no resemblance to it. If you are a current Perennial shareholder, you should leave now.

Perennial and its siblings, FPA Paramount (FPRAX) and the closed-end Source Capital (SOR), were virtual clones, managed by Steve Geist and Eric Ende. While the rest of FPA were hard-core absolute value guys, G&E ran splendid small- to mid-cap growth funds, fully invested in very high-quality companies, negligible turnover, drifting between small and mid, growth and blend. Returns were consistent and solid. Greg Herr was added to the team several years ago.

In 2013, FPA made the same transition at Paramount that’s envisaged here: the managers left, a new strategy was imposed and the portfolio was liquidated. Domestic growth became global value. Only the name remained the same.

With Perennial, not even the name will remain.

1. All of the managers are going. Mr. Geist retired in 2014 and Ende, at age 70, is moving toward the door. Mr. Herr is leaving to focus on Paramount. They are being replaced by Greg Nathan. Mr. Nathan is described as “the longest serving analyst for the Contrarian Value Strategy, including FPA Crescent Fund (FPACX).”
2. The strategy is going. Geist and Ende were small- to mid-cap growth. The new fund will be all-cap value. It will be the US equity manifestation of the stock-picking strategy used in Crescent, Paramount and International Value. It is a perfectly sensible strategy, but it bears no resemblance to the one for which the fund is known.
3. The portfolio is going. FPA warns that the change “will result in significant long-term capital gains.” Take that warning seriously.  Morningstar calculates your potential capital gains exposure at 63%, that is, 63% of the fund’s NAV is a result of so far untaxed capital gains. If the portfolio is liquidated, you could see up to $36/share in taxable distributions.  

   How likely is a hit of that magnitude? We can compare Paramount’s portfolio before and after the 2013 transition. Of the 31 stocks in Paramount’s portfolio:

   27 positions were entirely eliminated
   2 positions (WABCO and Zebra Technologies) were dramatically reduced
   1 position (Aggreko plc) was dramatically expanded
   1 position (Maxim Integrated Products) remained roughly equal

   During that transition, the fund paid out about 40% of its NAV in taxable gains including two large distributions over the course of two weeks at year’s end.

   Certainly the tax hit will vary based on your cost basis, but if your cost basis is high – $35/share or more – you might be better getting out before the big tax hit comes.

4. The name is going. The new fund will be named FPA S. Value Fund.

I rather like FPA’s absolute value orientation and FPA U.S. Value may well prove itself to be an excellent fund in the long-term. In the short term, however, it’s likely to be a tax nightmare led in an entirely new direction by an inexperienced manager. If you bought FPPFX because you likely want what Geist & Ende did, you might want to look at Motley Fool Great America (TMFGX). It’s got a similar focus on quality growth, low turnover and small- to mid-cap domestic stocks. It’s small enough to be nimble and we’ve identified it as a Great Owl Fund for its consistently excellent risk-adjusted returns.

The mills of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.

The SEC this month announced sanctions against two funds for misdeeds that took place five to seven years ago while a third fund worked to get ahead of SEC concerns about its advisor.

On June 17, 2015, the SEC issued penalties to Commonwealth Capital Management and three former three independent members of its mutual fund board. The basic argument is that, between 2008 and 2010, the adviser fed crap to the board and they blindly gobbled it up. (Why does neither half of their equation surprise me?) The SEC’s exact argument is that the board provided misleading information about the fund to the directors and the independent directors failed to exercise reasonable diligence in examining the evidence before approving a new investment contract. The fund in question was small and bad; it quickly added “extinct” to its list of attributes.

On June 22, 2015, the Board of Trustees of the Vertical Capital Income Fund (VCAPX) terminated the investment advisory agreement with Vertical Capital Asset Management, LLC. The fund’s auditor has also resigned. The Board’s vaguely phrased concern is that VCAM “lacks sufficient resources to meet its obligations to the Fund, and failed to adequately monitor the actions of its affiliate Vertical Recovery Management in its duties as the servicing agent of the mortgage notes held by the Fund.”

On June 23, 2015, the SEC reached a settlement with Pekin Singer Strauss Asset Management (PSS), advisor to the Appleseed Fund (APPLX) and portfolio managers William Pekin and Joshua Strauss.  The SEC found “that the securities laws were violated in 2009 and 2010 when PSS did not conduct timely internal annual compliance reviews or implement and enforce certain policies and procedures.” PSS also failed to move clients from the higher-cost investor shares to the lower-cost institutional ones. No one admits or denies anything, though PSS were the ones who detected and corrected the share class issue on their own.

Morningstar, once a fan of the fund, has placed them “under review” as they sort out the implications. That’s got to sting since Appleseed so visibly positions itself as a socially-responsible fund.

Top developments in fund industry litigation

Fundfox, launched in 2012, is the mutual fund industry’s only litigation intelligence service, delivering exclusive litigation information and real-time case documents neatly organized, searchable, and filtered as never before. For the complete list of developments last month, and for information and court documents in any case, log in at www.fundfox.com and navigate to Fundfox Insider.

Order

• The court gave its final approval to a $9.475 million settlement in the ERISA class action that challenged MassMutual‘s receipt of revenue-sharing payments from third-party mutual funds. (Golden Star, Inc. v. Mass Mut. Life Ins. Co.)

Briefs

• Calamos filed a motion to dismiss excessive-fee litigation regarding its Growth Fund. Brief: “Plaintiffs advance overwrought policy critiques of the entire mutual fund industry, legally inapt comparisons between services rendered to a retail mutual fund (such as the [Growth] Fund) and those provided to an institutional account or as sub-adviser, and conclusory assertions that the Fund grew over time but did not reduce its fees that are just the sort of allegations that courts in this Circuit have consistently dismissed for more than 30 years.” (Chill v. Calamos Advisors LLC.)
• Parties filed dueling motions for summary judgment in fee litigation regarding eight Hartford mutual funds. Plaintiffs’ section 36(b) claims, first filed in 2011, previously survived Hartford’s motion to dismiss. The summary judgment briefs are unavailable on PACER. (Kasilag v. Hartford Inv. Fin. Servs. LLC; Kasilag v. Hartford Funds Mgmt. Co.)
• New York Life filed a motion to dismiss excessive-fee litigation regarding four of its MainStay funds. Brief: Plaintiffs’ complaint “asserts in conclusory fashion that Defendant New York Life Investment Management LLC (‘NYLIM’) received excessive fees for management of four mutual funds, merely because NYLIM hired subadvisors to assist with its duties and paid them a portion of the total management fee. But NYLIM’s employment of this manager/subadvisor structure—widely utilized throughout the mutual fund industry and endorsed by NYLIM’s regulator—cannot itself constitute a breach of NYLIM’s fiduciary duty under Section 36(b) of the Investment Company Act . . . .” (Redus-Tarchis v. N.Y. Life Inv. Mgmt., LLC.)

The Alt Perspective: Commentary and news from DailyAlts.

Survey Says…

The spring is the season for surveys and big opinion pieces. Perhaps it is the looming summer vacations of readers that prompt companies to survey the market for opinions and views on particular topics before everyone heads out of the office for a long break. Regardless, the survey results are in, the results have been tallied and in the world of liquid alternatives, it appears that the future looks good.

Two industry surveys that were completed recently are cited in the articles below. The first provides the results of a survey of financial advisors about their allocations to alternative investments, and notes that more than half of the financial advisors surveyed think that their clients should allocate between 6% and 15% to alternative investments – a significant increase from today’s levels.

The second report below provides big picture industry thinking from Citi’s Business Advisory Services unit, and projects the market for liquid alternatives to double over the next five years, increasing to more than $1.7 trillion in assets.

• Majority of Advisors Plan to Continue Recommending Alternatives
• Citi Sees Boom in Unconstrained Long, Smart Beta and Liquid Alts

While industry surveys and big picture industry reports can often over-project the optimism and growth of a particular product group, the directional trends are important to watch. And in this case, the trends continue to be further growth of the liquid alternatives market, both here in the U.S. and abroad.

Monthly Liquid Alternative Flows

Consistent with the reports above, investors continued to allocate to alternative mutual funds and ETFs in May of this year. Investors allocated a net total of $2 billion to the space in May, a healthy increase from April’s level of $723 million, and a return to levels we saw earlier in the year.

While only two categories had positive inflows last month, this month has four categories with positive inflows. Once again, multi-alternative funds that combine multiple styles of investing, and often multiple asset managers, all into a single fund had the most significant inflows. These funds pulled in $1.8 billion in net new assets. Managed futures are once again in second place with just over $520 million in new inflows.

While the outflows from long/short equity funds have moved closer to $0, they have yet to turn positive this year. With equity market conditions as they are, this has the potential to shift to net inflows over the coming months. Commodity funds continued to struggle in May, but investors kicked it up a notch and increased the net outflows to more than $1.5 billion, more than a double from April’s level.

Diversification and one stop shopping continue to be an important theme for investors. Multi-alternative fund and managed futures funds provide both. Expect asset flows to liquid alternatives to continue on their current course of strong single-digit to low double-digit growth. Should the current Greek debt crisis or other global events cause the markets to falter, investors will look to allocate more to liquid alternatives.

New Fund Launches

We have seen 66 new funds launched this year, up from 53 at the end of April. This includes alternative beta funds as well as non-traditional bond funds, both of which provide investors with differentiated sources of return. In May, we logged 13 new funds, with nearly half being alternative beta funds. The remaining funds cut across multi-alternative, non-traditional bonds and hedged equity.

Two of the funds that were launched in May were unconstrained bond funds, one of the more popular categories for asset inflows in 2014. This asset category is meant to shield investors from the potential rise in interest rates and the related negative impact of bond prices. Both Virtus and WisdomTree placed a bet on the space in May with their new funds that give the portfolio managers wide latitude to invest across nearly all areas of the global fixed income market on a long and short basis.

While significant assets have flowed into this category of funds over the past several years, the rise in interest rates has yet to occur. This may change come September, and at that point we will find out if the unconstrained nature of these funds is helpful.

For more details on new fund launches, you can visit our New Funds 2015 page.

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. 

Eventide Healthcare & Life Sciences (ETNHX): Morningstar’s 2015 conference included a laudatory panel celebrating “up and coming” funds, including the five star, $2 billion Eventide Gilead. At yet as I talked with the Eventide professionals the talk kept returning to the fund that has them more excited, Healthcare. The fund looks fascinating and profitable. Unfortunately, we need answers to two final questions before publishing the profile. We’re hopeful of having those answers in the first couple days of July; we’ll notify the 6000 members of our mailing list as soon as the profile goes live

Launch Alert

Thornburg Developing World (THDAX) is one of the two reasons for being excited about Artisan Developing World (ARTYX). Artisan’s record for finding and nurturing outstanding management teams is the other.

Lewis Kaufman managed Thornburg Developing World from inception through early 2015. During that time, he amassed a remarkable record for risk-sensitive performance.  A $10,000 investment at inception would have grown to $15,700 on the day of Mr. Kaufman’s departure, while his peers would have earned $11,300. Morningstar’s only Gold-rated emerging markets fund (American Funds New World Fund NEWFX) would have clocked in at $13,300, a gain about midway between mediocre and Mr. Kaufmann.

By all of the risk and risk/return measures we follow, he achieved those gains with lower volatility than did his peers.

Mr. Kaufman pursues a compact, primarily large-cap portfolio. He’s willing to invest in firms tied to, but not domiciled in, the emerging markets. And he has a special interest in self-funding companies; that is, firms that generate free cash flow sufficient to cover their operating and capital needs. That allows the firms insulate themselves from both the risk of international capital flight and dysfunctional capital markets that are almost a defining feature of the emerging markets. Andrew Foster of Seafarer Overseas Growth & Income (SFGIX) shares that preference for self-funding firms and it has been consistently rewarding.

There are, of course, two caveats. First, Thornburg launched after the conclusion of the 2007-09 market crisis. That means that it only dealt with one sharply down quarter (3Q2011) and it trailed the pack then. Second, Thornburg’s deep analyst core doubtless contributed to Mr. Kaufmann’s success. It’s unclear how reliance on a smaller team will affect him.

In general, Artisan’s new funds have performed exceptionally well (the current E.M. product, which wasn’t launched in the retail market, is the exception). Artisan professes only ever to hire “category killers,” then gives them both great support and great autonomy. That process has worked exceptionally well. I suggested on our discussion board “that immediately upon launch, our short-list of emerging markets funds quite worth your money’ will grow by one.” I’m pretty comfortable with that prediction.

Artisan Developing World (ARTYX) has a 1.5% initial expense ratio and a $1,000 investment minimum.

Funds in Registration

There are eight new funds in registration this month. Funds in registration with the SEC are not available for sale to the public and the advisors are not permitted to talk about them, but a careful reading of the filed prospectuses gives you a good idea of what interesting (and occasionally appalling) options are in the pipeline. Funds currently in registration will generally be available for purchase in September or early October.

Two funds sort of pop out:

RiverNorth Marketplace Lending Fund will invest in loans initiated by peer-to-peer lenders such as LendingClub and Prosper.com. It’s structured as a non-listed closed-end fund which will likely offer only periodic liquidity; that is, you might be able to get out just once a month or so. The portfolio’s characteristics should make it similar to high-yield bonds, offering the chance for some thrills and interest rate insulation plus high single-digit returns. It’s a small market; about $7 billion in loans were made last year, which makes it most appropriate to a specialist boutique firm like RiverNorth.

Thornburg Better World will be an international fund with strong ESG screens. Thornburg’s international funds are uniformly in the solid-to-outstanding range, though the departure of Lewis Kaufmann and some of his analysts for Artisan certainly make a dent. That said, Thornburg’s analyst core is large and well-respected and socially-responsible investing has established itself as an entirely mainstream strategy.

Manager Changes

This month there were only 38 funds reporting partial or complete changes in their management teams. This number is slightly inflated by the departure of Wayne Crumpler from eleven American Beacon funds. The most notable changes include Virginie Maisonneuve’s departure from another PIMCO fund, and Thomas Huber stepping down from T. Rowe Price Growth & Income. The good news is that he’s remaining at T. Rowe Price Dividend Growth where he’s had a longer record and more success.

Updates

In May we ran The Dry Powder Gang, a story highlighting successful funds that are currently holding exceptionally high levels of cash. After publication, we heard from two advisors who warned that their funds’ cash levels were dramatically lower than we’d reported: FMI International (FMIJX) and Tocqueville International Value (TIVFX).

The error came from, and remains in, the outputs from Morningstar’s online fund screener.  Here is Morningstar’s report of the most cash-heavy international funds, based on a June 30 2015 screening:

Cool, except for the fact the Brown is 9% cash, not 66%; FMI is 20%, not 62%; AQR is 7%, not 56% … down to Tocqueville which is 6%, not 38%.

Where do those lower numbers come from? Morningstar, of course, on the funds’ “quote” and “portfolio” pages.

We promptly corrected our misreport and contacted Morningstar. Alexa Auerbach, a kind and crafty wizard there, explained the difficulty: the cash levels reported in the screener are “long rescaled” numbers. If a fund has both long and short positions, which is common in international funds which are hedging their currency exposures, Morningstar recalculates the cash position as a percentage of the fund’s long portfolio. “So,” I asked, “if a fund was 99% short and 1% long, including a 0.3% cash position, the screener would report a 30% cash stake?” Yep.

When I mentioned that anomaly to John Rekenthaler, Morningstar’s resident thunderer and former head of research, he was visibly aroused. “Long-rescaled? I thought I’d killed that beast five years ago!” And, grabbing a cudgel, he headed off again in the direction of IT.

I’ll let you know how the quest goes. In the interim, we will, and you should be a bit vigilant in checking curious outputs from the software.

Trust but Verify

On December 9, 2014, BlackRock president Larry Fink told a Bloomberg TV interviewer, “I am absolutely convinced we will have a day, a week, two weeks where we will have a dysfunctional market. It’s going to create some sort of panic, create uncertainty again.” That’s pretty much the argument that Ed and I have made, in earlier months, about ongoing liquidity constraints and an eventual crisis. It’s a reasonably widespread topic of conversation about serious investment professionals, as well as the likes of us.

Fink’s solution was electronic bond trading and his fear was not the prospect of the market crisis but, rather, of regulators reacting inappropriately. In the interim, BlackRock applied for permission to do inter-fund lending: if one of their mutual funds needed cash to meet redemptions, they could take a short-term loan from a cash-rich BlackRock fund in lieu of borrowing from the banks or hastily selling part of the portfolio. It is a pretty common provision.

Which you’d never know from one gold bug’s conclusion that Fink sounded “BlackRock’s Warning: Get Your Money Out Of All Mutual Funds.” It’s the nature of the web that that same story, generally positioned as “What They Don’t Want You to Know,” appeared on a dozen other websites, some with remarkably innocuous names. Those stories stressed that the problem would last “days or even weeks,” which is not what Fink said.

Briefly Noted . . .

On June 4, 2015, John L. Keeley, Jr., the president and founder of Keeley Asset Management and a portfolio manager to several of the Keeley funds passed away at a still-young 75. He’s survived by his wife of 50+ years and a large family. His rich life, good works and premature departure remind us all of the need to embrace our lives while we can, rather than dully plodding through them.

Conestoga SMid Cap Fund (CCSMX) just gained, with shareholder approval, a 12(b)1 fee. (Shareholders are a potentially valuable source of lanolin.) Likewise, the Hennessy Funds are asking shareholders to raise their costs via a 12(b)1 fee on the Investor Class of the Hennessy Funds.

In the “let’s not be too overt about this” vein, Janus quietly added a co-manager to Janus Unconstrained Global Bond (JUCAX).  According to the WSJ, Janus bought the majority stake in an Australian bond firm, Kapstream Capital Pty Ltd., then appointed Kapstream’s founder to co-manage Unconstrained Bond.  Kumar Palghat, the co-manager in question, is a former PIMCO executive who managed a $22 billion bond portfolio for PIMCO’s Australian division. He resigned in 2006, reportedly to join a hedge fund.

It’s intriguing that Gross, who once managed $1.8 trillion, is struggling with one-tenth of one percent of that amount. Janus Unconstrained is volatile and underwater since launch. Its performance trails that of PIMCO Unconstrained (PFIUX), the BarCap Aggregate, its non-traditional bond peer group, and most other reasonable measures.

PIMCO has announced reverse share-splits of 2:1 or 3:1 for a series of its funds: PIMCO Commodity Real Return Strategy Fund (PCRAX), PIMCO RAE Fundamental Advantage PLUS Fund (PTFAX), PIMCO Real Estate Real Return Strategy Fund (PETAX) and PIMCO StocksPLUS Short Fund (PSSAX). Most of the funds have NAVs in the neighborhood of $2.50-4.00. At that level, daily NAV changes of under 0.25% don’t get reflected (they round down to zero) until a couple consecutive unreported changes pile up and trigger an unusually large one day move.

O Canada! Your home and native land!! Vanguard just noticed that Canada exists and that it is (who knew?) a developed market. As a result, the Vanguard Developed Markets Index Fund will now track the FTSE Developed All Cap ex US Index rather than the FTSE Developed ex North America Index. The board has also approved the addition of the Canadian market to the Fund’s investment objective. Welcome, o’ land of pines and maples, stalwart sons and gentle maidens!

Vanguard’s Emerging Markets, Pacific and European stock index funds will also get new indexes, some time late in 2015. Vanguard’s being intentionally vague on the timing of the transition to try to prevent front-running by hedge funds and others. In each case, the new index will include a greater number of small- to mid-cap names. The Emerging Markets index will, in addition, include Chinese “A” shares. One wonders if recent events are causing them to reconsider?

Villere Balanced Fund (VILLX) and Villere Equity Fund (VLEQX) may, effective immediately, lend securities – generally, that means “to short sellers” – “in order to generate return.”

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

AMG Yacktman (YACKX) and AMG Yacktman Focused (YAFFX) both reopened to new investors on June 22, 2015. The reopening engendered a lively debate on our discussion board. One camp pointed out that these are top 1% performers over the past 10- and 15-year periods. The other mentioned that they’re bottom 10% performers over the past 3- and 5-year periods. The question of asset bloat (about $20 billion between them) came up as did the noticeable outflows ($4 billion between them) in the last several years. There was a sense that the elder Mr. Yacktman was brilliant and a phenomenally decent man but, really, moving well into the “elder” ranks. Son Steve, who has been handling the funds’ day-to-day operations for 15 years is … hmmm, well, a piece of work.

The Barrow Funds, Barrow Value Opportunity Fund (BALAX/BALIX) and Barrow Long/Short Opportunity Fund (BFLSX/BFSLX) are converting from two share classes to one. The investor share class closed to new purchases on June 2 and merged into the institutional share class on June 30. At that same time, the minimum investment requirement for the institutional shares dropped from $250,000 to $2,500.  The net effect is that Barrow gets administrative simplicity and their investors, current and potential, get a price break.

Effective immediately, the name of the Hatteras Hedged Strategies Fund has changed to Hatteras Alternative Multi-Manager Fund (HHSIX).  Here’s the “small wins” part: they’ve sliced their minimum initial investment from $150 million to $1 million! Woo hoo! And here’s the tricky part: the fund has only $97 million in assets which implies that the exalted minimum was honored mostly in the breach.

The Royce Funds reduced their advisory fees for their European Smaller-Companies Fund, Global Value, International Smaller-Companies, International Micro-Cap and International Premier funds on July 1, 2015. The reductions are about 15 basis points, which translates to a drop in the funds’ expense ratios of about 10%.

Nota bene: the Royce Funds make me crazy. After a series of liquidations in April, there are 22 funds left which will drop to 21 in a couple of months. Of those, two have above average returns for the past five years while 16 trail at least 80% of their peers. The situation over the past decade is better, but not much. If you screen out the sucky, high risk and economically unviable Royce funds, you get down to about five: Global Financial Services and a bunch that existed before Legg Mason bought the firm and got them to start churning out new funds.

Effective June 1, 2015, the Schroder U.S. Opportunities Fund (SCUIX), which had been closed to new investors, will become available for purchase by investors generally. Actually with a $250,000 investment minimum, it “became available for purchase by really rich investors generally.”

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Effective as of the close of business on July 15, 2015, Brown Advisory Small-Cap Fundamental Value Fund (BIAUX) will stop accepting new purchases through most broker-dealer firms.

Eaton Vance Atlanta Capital Horizon Growth Fund (EXMCX) announced its plan to close to new investors on July 13, 2015. I wouldn’t run for your checkbook just yet. The fund has only $34 million in assets and has trailed pretty much everybody in its peer group, pretty much forever:

INTECH U.S. Core Fund (JDOAX) closed to new investors on June 30, 2015. Why, you ask? Good question. It’s a small fund that invests in large companies with a doggedly mediocre record. Not “bad,” “mediocre.” Over the past decade, it’s trailed the S&P 500 by 0.11% annually with no particular reduction of volatility. The official reason: “because Janus Capital and the Trustees believe continued sales are not in the best interests of the Fund.”

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

The Calvert Social Index Fund is now Calvert U.S. Large Cap Core Responsible Index Fund (CSXAX). At the same time, the adviser reduced the fund’s expense ratio by nearly one-third, from 0.75% down to 0.54% for “A” shares.  

Effective June 2, 2015, Columbia LifeGoal Growth Portfolio, a fund of funds, became Columbia Global Strategic Equity Fund (NLGIX). At the same time the principal investment strategies were revised (good plan! It trails 90% of its peers over the past 1, 3 and 5 years) to eliminate a lot of the clutter about how much goes into which Columbia fund. The proviso that the fund will invest at least “40% of its net assets in foreign currencies, and equity and debt securities” implies a currency-hedged portfolio.

FPA Perennial (FPPFX) has closed for a few months while it becomes an entirely different fund using the same name.

Effective immediately, the name of the Hatteras Hedged Strategies Fund has changed to Hatteras Alternative Multi-Manager Fund (HHSIX). 

On August 31, 2015: iShares MSCI USA ETF (EUSA) becomes iShares MSCI USA Equal Weighted ETF. We’ll leave it to you to figure out how they might be changing the portfolio.

Natixis Diversified Income Fund (IIDPX) becomes Loomis Sayles Multi-Asset Income Fund on August 31, 2015. The investment strategy gets tweaked accordingly.

-er, don’t panic! A handful of Royce funds have lost their –ers. On June 15, Royce International Smaller-Companies Fund became Royce International Small-Cap Fund (RYGSX), European Smaller-Companies Fund became European Small-Cap Fund (RISCX) and Royce Financial Services Fund became Royce Global Financial Services Fund (RYFSX). In the former two cases, the managers wanted to highlight the fact that they focused on a stock’s capitalization rather than the size of the underlying firm. In the latter case, RYFSX has about five times the international exposure of its peers. Given that excellent performance (top 2% over the past decade) and a distinctive portfolio (their market cap is one-twentieth of their peers) hasn’t drawn assets, I suppose they’re hoping that a new name will. At the very least, with eight funds – over a third of their lineup – renamed in the past three months, that’s the way they’re betting.

Oppenheimer Flexible Strategies Fund (QVOPX) becomes Oppenheimer Fundamental Alternatives Fund on August 3, 2015. There’s no change in the fund’s operation, so apparently “strategies” are “alternatives,” just not trendy alternatives.

On June 22, 2015, the Sterling Capital Strategic Allocation Conservative Fund (BCGAX) morphed into Sterling Capital Diversified Income Fund. Heretofore it’s been a fund of Sterling funds. With the new name comes the ability to invest in other funds as well.

In case you hadn’t noticed, on June 18, 2015, the letters “TDAM” were replaced by the word “Epoch” in the names of a bunch of funds: Epoch U.S. Equity Shareholder Yield Fund, Epoch U.S. Large Cap Core Equity Fund, Epoch Global Equity Shareholder Yield Fund, Epoch Global All Cap Fund, and Epoch U.S. Small-Mid Cap Equity Fund. The funds, mostly bad, have two share classes each and have authorization to launch eight additional share classes. Except for U.S. Small-Mid Cap, they have $3-6 million in assets.

Effective July 31, 2015 Virtus Global Dividend Fund (PGUAX), a perfectly respectable fund with lots of global infrastructure exposure, becomes Virtus Global Infrastructure Fund.

Effective August 28, 2015, the West Shore Real Return Income Fund (NWSFX) becomes West Shore Real Return Fund. They’re also changing their objective from “capital growth and current income” to “preserving purchasing power.” They’ve pretty much completely rewritten their “principal strategies” text so that it’s hard to know how exactly the portfolio will change, though the addition of a risk statement concerning the use of futures and other derivatives does offer a partial answer. I’ve been genially skeptical of the fund for a long while. Their performance chart doesn’t materially reduce that skepticism:

At a reader’s behest, I spoke at length with one of the managers whose answers seemed mostly circular and who was reluctant to share information about the fund. He claimed that they have a great record as a private strategy, that they’ve shown to the board, but that they’re not interested in sharing with others. His basic argument was: “we don’t intend to make information about the fund, our strategies or insights available on the web. Our website is just a pick-up point for the prospectus. We expect that people will either know us already or will follow our success and be drawn.” At the end of the call, he announced that he and co-manager James Rickards were mostly the public faces of the fund and that the actual work of managing it fell to the third member of the trio. Mr. Rickards has since left to resume his career as doom-sayer.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Aftershock Strategies Fund (SHKIX/SHKNX) has closed and will discontinue its operations effective July 6, 2015.

You’ll need to find an alternative to AMG FQ Global Alternatives Fund (MGAAX), which is in the process of liquidating. Apparently they’re liquidating (or solidifying?) cash:

Final shutdown should occur by the end of July.

Elessar SCV Fund has morphed into the Emerald Small Cap Value Fund (ELASX)

Franklin Templeton has delayed by a bit the liquidation of Franklin Global Allocation Fund (FGAAX). The original date of execution was June 30 but “due to delays in liquidating certain portfolio securities,” they anticipate waiting until October 23. That’s a fascinating announcement since it implies liquidity problems though that’s not listed as an investment risk in the prospectus.

Guggenheim Enhanced World Equity Fund “ceased operations, liquidated its assets, and distributed the liquidation proceeds to shareholders of record at the close of business on June 26, 2015.”

Salient recently bought the Forward Funds complex “in an effort to build scale in the rapidly growing liquid alternatives space.” The brilliance of the deal is debatable (Forward favors liquid alts investing, but only three of its 30 funds – Select Emerging Markets Dividend, Credit Analysis Long/Short (whose founding managers were sacked a year ago) and High Yield Bond – have outperformed their peers since inception). As it turns out, Forward Small Cap Equity Fund (FFSCX) and Forward Income & Growth Allocation Fund (AOIAX) fell into neither of those camps: good or alternative. Both are scheduled to be liquidated on August 12, 2015.

HSBC RMB Fixed Income Fund (HRMBX), an exceptionally strong EM bond fund with no investors, will be liquidated on or about July 21, 2015.

MainStay ICAP Global Fund (ICGLX) will be liquidated on or about September 30, 2015. Small, middling performer, culled from the herd.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Other times a picture leaves me speechless. Such is the case with the YTD price chart for Merk Currency Enhanced U.S. Equity Fund (MUSFX).

Yuh. That’s a one-day spike of about 60%, followed by a 60% fall the next day for a net loss of a third over two days, at which point the fund was no longer “pursuing its investment objective.” The fund is scheduled to be liquidated July 15.

Montibus Small Cap Growth Fund (SGWAX) joins the legion of the dearly departed on August 24, 2015.

Nationwide HighMark Balanced Fund (NWGDX) will, pending shareholder approval, vanish on or about October 23, 2015. At about the same time Nationwide HighMark Large Cap Growth (NWGLX) is slated to merge into Nationwide Large Cap Core Equity while Nationwide HighMark Value (NWGTX) gets swallowed by Nationwide Fund (NWFAX). The latter has been rallying after getting a new manager in 2013, so we’ll be hopeful that this is a gain for shareholders.

At the end of July, shareholders will vote on a proposal to merge the small and sad Royce Select Fund (RYSFX) into the much larger and sadder Royce 100 (RYOHX). The proxy assures investors that “the Funds have identical investment objectives, employ substantially similar principal investment strategies to pursue those investment objectives, and have the same portfolio managers,” which raises the question of why they launched Select in the first place.

The previously announced liquidation of the half million dollar Rx Tax Advantaged Fund (FMERX) has been delayed until July 31, 2015. 

On or about August 25, 2015, the Vantagepoint Model Portfolio All-Equity Growth Fund (VPAGX) becomes Vantagepoint Model Portfolio Global Equity Growth Fund and increases its equity exposure to non-U.S. securities by adding an international index fund to its collection. The fund has about a billion in assets. Who knew?

Relationships come and relationships go. One of the few proprieties that my students observe is, if you’ve actually met and gone out in person, you should be willing to break up in person. Breaking up by text is, they agreed, cruel and cowardly. I suspect that they’re unusually sympathetic with the managers of Wells Fargo Advantage Emerging Markets Local Bond Fund (WLBAX) and Wells Fargo Advantage Emerging Markets Equity Select Fund (WEMTX). “At a telephonic meeting held on June 15, 2015, the Board of Trustees unanimously approved the liquidation of the Funds.” Cold, dude. If you’d like to extend your sympathies, best send the text before July 17, 2015.

Wilmington Mid-Cap Growth Fund (AMCRX) will liquidate on or about August 3, 2015. Being “not very good” (they’ve trailed two-thirds of their peers for the past five and ten years) didn’t stop them from accumulating a quarter billion in assets but somehow the combination wasn’t enough to keep them around. Wilmington Small-Cap Strategy Fund (WMSIX), a small institutional fund with a pretty solid record and stable management, goes into the vortex that same day.

In Closing . . .

Thank you, once again, to those whose support keeps the lights on at the Observer. To Diane & Tom, Allen & Cleo, Hjalmar, Ed (cool and mysterious email address, sir!): we appreciate you!  A great, big thanks to those who use the Observer’s Amazon link for all their Amazon purchases. Your consistency, and occasional exuberant purchase, continues to help us beat our normal pattern of declining revenue in the summer months. We’d also be remiss if we forgot to thank the faithful Deborah and Greg, our honorary subscribers and PayPal monthly contributors. Many thanks to you both.

Lots to do for August. We’ve been watching the folks at the Turner Funds thrash about, both in court and in the marketplace. We’ll try to give you some perspective on what some have called The Fall of the House of Turner. In addition, we’d like to look at the question, “where should you start out?” That is, if you or a young friend of yours is a 20-something with exceedingly modest cash flow but a determination to build a sensible, durable foundation, which funds might serve as your (or their) best first investment: conservative, affordable, sensible.

And, too, I’ve got to prepare for a couple presentations: a talk with some of the young analysts at Edward Jones in St. Louis and with the folks attending Ultimus Fund Solution’s client conference at the end of August and beginning of September. If I find something fun, you’ll be the second to know!

As ever,

Dear friends,

Welcome to the New Year!

And to an odd question: why is it a New Year?  That is, why January 1?  Most calendrical events correspond to something: cycles of the moon and stars, movement of the seasons, conclusions of wars or deaths of Great Men.

But why January 1?  It corresponds with nothing.

Here’s the short answer: your recent hangover and binge of bowl watching were occasioned by the scheming of some ancient Roman high priest, named a pontifex, and the political backlash to his overreach. Millennia ago, the Romans had a year that started sensibly enough, at the beginning of spring when new life began appearing. But the year also ended with the winter solstice and a year-end party that could stretch on for weeks.  December, remember? Translates as “the tenth month” out of ten.

So what happened in between the party and the planting? The usual stuff, I suppose: sex, lies, lies about sex, dinner and work.  What didn’t happen was politics: new governments, elected in the preceding year, weren’t in power until the new year began. And who decided exactly when the new year began? The pontifex. And how did the pontifex decide? Oracles, goat entrails and auguries, mostly. And also a keen sense of whether he liked the incoming government more than the outgoing one.  If the incoming government promised to be a pain in the butt, the new year might start a bit later.  If the new government was full of friends, the new year might start dramatically earlier. And if the existing government promised to be an annoyance in the meanwhile, the pontifex could declare an extended religious holiday during which time the government could not convene.

Eventually Julius Caesar and the astronomer Sosigenes got together to create a twelve month calendar whose new year commenced just after the hangover from the year-end parties faded. Oddly, the post-Roman Christian world didn’t adopt January 1 (pagan!) as the standard start date for another 1600 years.  Pope Gregory tried to fiat the new start day. Protestant countries flipped him off. In England and the early US, New Year’s Day was March 25^th, for example. Eventually the Brits standardized it in their domains in 1750.

Pagan priest examining the gall bladder of a goat. Ancient politics and hefty campaign contributions.

So, why exactly does it make sense for you to worry about how your portfolio did in 2014?  The end date of the year is arbitrary. It corresponds neither to the market’s annual flux nor to the longer seven(ish) year cycles in which the market rises and falls, much less your own financial needs and resources.

I got no clue. You?

I’d hoped to start the year by sharing My Profound Insights into the year ahead, so I wandered over to the Drawer of Clues. Empty. Nuts. The Change Jar of Market Changes? Nothing except some candy wrappers that my son stuffed in there. The white board listing The Four Funds You Must Own for 2015? Carried off by some red-suited vagrant who snuck in on Christmas Eve. (Also snagged my sugar cookies and my bottle of Drambuie. Hope he got pulled over for impaired flying.)

Oddly, I seem to be the only person who doesn’t know where things are going. The Financial Times reports that “the ‘divergence’ between the economies of the US and the rest of the world … features in almost every 2015 outlook from Wall Street strategists.” Yves Kuhn, an investment strategist from Luxembourg, notes the “the biggest consensus by any margin is to be long dollar, short euro … I have never seen such a consensus in the market.” Barron’s December survey of economists and strategists: “the consensus is ‘stick with the bull.’” James Paulsen, allowed that “There’s some really, really strong Wall Street consensus themes right now” in favor of US stocks, the dollar and low interest rates.  

Of course, the equally universal consensus in January 2014 was for rising interest rates, soaring energy prices and a crash in the bond market.

Me? I got no clue. Here’s the best I got:

• Check to see if you’ve got a plan. If not, get one. Fund an emergency account. Start investing in a conservative fund for medium time horizon needs. Work through a sensible asset allocation plan for the long-term. It’s not as hard as you want to imagine it is.
• Pursue it with some discipline. Find a sustainable monthly contribution. Set your investments on auto-pilot. Move any windfalls – whether it’s a bonus or a birthday check – into your savings. If you get a raise (I’m cheering for you!), increase your savings to match.
• Try not to screw yourself. Again. Don’t second guess yourself. Don’t obsess about your portfolio. Don’t buy because it’s been going up and you’re feeling left out. Don’t sell because your manager is being patient and you aren’t.
• Try not to let other people screw you. Really, if your fund has a letter after its name, figure out why. It means you’re paying extra. Be sure you know what exactly you’re paying and why.
• Make yourself useful, ‘cause then you’ll also make yourself happy. Get in the habit of reading again. Books. You know: the dead tree things. There’s pretty good research suggesting that the e-versions disrupt sleep and addle your mind. Try just 30 minutes in the evening with the electronics shut down, perusing Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2011) or Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2012). Read it with someone you enjoy hugging. Upgrade your news consumption: listen to the Marketplace podcasts or programs. Swear you’ll never again watch a “news program” that has a ticker constantly distracting you with unexplained 10 word snippets that pretend to explain global events. Set up a recurring contribution to your local food bank (I’ll give you the link to mine if you can’t find your own), shelter (animal or otherwise), or cause. They need you and you need to get outside yourself, to reconnect to something more important than YouTube, your portfolio or your gripes.

For those irked by sermonettes, my senior colleague has been reflecting on the question of what lessons we might draw from the markets of 2014 and offers a far more nuanced take in …

Reflections – 2014

By Edward Studzinski

The Mountains are High, and the Emperor is Far, Far Away

Chinese Aphorism

Year-end 2014 presents investors with a number of interesting conundrums. For a U.S. dollar investor, the domestic market, as represented by the S&P 500, provided a total return of 13.6%, at least for those invested in it by the proxy of Vanguard’s S&P 500 Index Fund Admiral Shares. Just before Christmas, John Authers of the Financial Times, in a piece entitled “Investment: Loser’s Game” argued that this year, with more than 90% of active managers on track to underperform their benchmarks, a tipping point may have finally been reached. The exodus of money from actively managed funds has accelerated. Vanguard is on track to take in close to $200B (yes, billion) into its passive funds this year.

And yet, I have to ask if it really matters. As I watch the postings on the Mutual Fund Observer’s discussion board, I suspect that achieving better than average investment performance is not what motivates many of our readers. Rather, there is a Walter Mittyesque desire to live vicariously through their portfolios. And every bon mot that Bill (take your pick, there are a multitude of them) or Steve or Michael or Bob drops in a print or televised interview is latched on to as a reaffirmation the genius and insight to invest early on with one of The Anointed. The disease exists in a related form at the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Circus in Omaha. Sooner or later, in an elevator or restaurant, you will hear a discussion of when that person started investing with Warren and how much money they have made. The reality is usually less that we would like to know or admit, as my friend Charles has pointed out in his recent piece about the long-term performance of his investments.

Rather than continuing to curse the darkness, let me light a few candles.

1. When are index funds appropriate for an investment program? For most of middle America, I am hard pressed to think of when they are not. They are particularly important for those individuals who are not immortal. You may have constructed a wonderful portfolio of actively-managed funds. Unfortunately, if you pass away suddenly, your spouse or family may find that they have neither the time nor the interest to devote to those investments that you did. And that assumes a static environment (no personnel changes) in the funds you are invested in, and that the advisors you have selected, if any, will follow your lead. But surprise – if you are dead, often not at the time of your choice, you cannot control things from the hereafter. Sit in trust investment committee meetings as I did for many years, and what you will most likely hear is – “I don’t care what old George wanted – that fund is not on our approved list and to protect ourselves, we should sell it, regardless of its performance or the tax consequences.”
2. How many mutual funds should one own? The interplay here is diversification and taxes. I suspect this year will prove a watershed event as investors find that their actively-managed fund has generated a huge tax bill for them while not beating its respective benchmark, or perhaps even losing money. The goal should probably be to own fewer than ten in a family unit, including individual and retirement investments. The right question to ask is why you invested in a particular fund to begin with. If you can’t remember, or the reason no longer applies, move on. In particular, retirement and 401(k) assets should be consolidated down to a smaller number of funds as you get older. Ideally they should be low cost, low expense funds. This can be done relatively easily by use of trustee to trustee transfers. And forget target date funds – they are a marketing gimmick, predicated on life expectancies not changing.
3. Don’t actively managed funds make sense in some circumstances? Yes, but you really have to do a lot of due diligence, probably more than most investment firms will let you do. Just reading the Morningstar write-ups will not cut it. I think there will be a time when actively-managed value funds will be the place to be, but we need a massive flush-out of the industry to occur first, followed by fear overcoming greed in the investing public. At that point we will probably get more regulation (oh for the days of Franklin Roosevelt putting Joe Kennedy in charge of the SEC, figuring that sometimes it makes sense to have the fox guarding the hen house).
4. Passive funds are attractive because of low expenses, and the fact that you don’t need to worry about managers departing or becoming ill. What should one look for in actively-managed funds? The simple answer is redundancy. Dodge and Cox is an ideal example, with all of their funds managed by reasonably-sized committees of very experienced investment personnel. And while smaller shops can argue that they have back-up and succession planning, often that is marketing hype and illusion rather than reality. I still remember a fund manager more than ten years ago telling me of a situation where a co-manager had been named to a fund in his organization. The CIO told him that it was to make the Trustees happy, giving the appearance of succession planning. But the CIO went on to say that if something ever happened to lead manager X, co-manager Y would be off the fund by sundown since Y had no portfolio management experience. Since learning such things is difficult from the outside, stick to the organizations where process and redundancy are obvious. Tweedy, Browne strikes me as another organization that fits the bill. Those are not meant as recommendations but rather are intended to give you some idea of what to look for in kicking tires and asking questions.

A few final thoughts – a lot of hedge funds folded in 2014, mainly for reasons of performance. I expect that trend to spread to mutual funds in 2015, especially those that are at best marginally profitable. Some of this is a function of having the usual acquiring firms (or stooges, as one investment banker friend calls them) – the Europeans – absent from the merger and acquisition trail. Given the present relationship of the dollar and the Euro, I don’t expect that trend to change soon. But I also expect funds to close just because the difficulty of outperforming in a world where events, to paraphrase Senator Warren, are increasingly rigged, is almost impossible. In a world of instant gratification, that successful active management is as much an art as a science should be self-evident. There is something in the process of human interaction which I used to refer to as complementary organizational dysfunction that produces extraordinary results, not easily replicable. And it involves more than just investment selection on the basis of reversion to the mean.

One example of genius would be Thomas Jefferson, dining alone, or Warren Buffet, sitting in his office, reading annual reports.  A different example would be the 1927 Yankees or the Fidelity organization of the 1980’s. In retrospect what made them great is easy to see. My advice to people looking for great active management today – look for organizations without self-promotion, where individuals do not seek out to be the new “It Girl” and where the organizations focus on attracting curious people with inquiring but disciplined minds, so that there ends up being a creative, dynamic tension. Avoid organizations that emphasize collegiality and consensus. In closing, let me remind you of that wonderful scene where Orson Welles, playing Harry Lime in The Third Man says,

… in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

Where In The World Is Your Fund Adviser?

When our esteemed colleague Ed Studzinski shares his views on an adviser or fund house, he invariably mentions location.

I’ve started to take notice.

Any place but Wall Street
Some fund advisers seem to identify themselves with their location. Smead Capital Management, Inc., which manages Smead Value Fund (SMVLX), states: ”Our compass bearings are slightly Northwest of Wall Street…” The firm is headquartered in Seattle.

SMVLX is a 5-year Great Owl sporting top quintile performance over the past 5-, 3-, and even 1-year periods (ref. Ratings Definitions):

Bill Smead believes the separation from Wall Street gives his firm an edge.

Legendary value investor Bruce Berkowitz, founder of Fairholme Capital Management, LLC seems to agree. Fortune reported that he moved the firm from New Jersey to Florida in 2006 in order to … ”put some space between himself and Wall Street … no matter where he went in town, he was in danger of running into know-it-all investors who might pollute his thinking. ’I had to get away,’ he says.”

In 2002, Charles Akre of Akre Capital Management, LLC, located his firm in Middleburg, Virginia. At that time, he was sub-advising Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co.’s FBR Focus Fund, an enormously successful fund. The picturesque town is in horse country. Since 2009, the firm’s Akre Focus Fund (AKREX/AKRIX) is a top-quintile performer and another 5-year Great Owl:

Perhaps location does matter?

Tales of intrigue and woe
Unfortunately, determining an adviser’s actual work location is not always so apparent. Sometimes it appears downright labyrinthine, if not Byzantine.

Take Advisors Preferred, LLC. Below is a snapshot of the firm’s contact page. There is no physical address. No discernable area code. Yet, it is the named adviser for several funds with assets under management (AUM) totaling half a billion dollars, including Hundredfold Select Alternative (SFHYX) and OnTrack Core Fund (OTRFX).

Advisors Preferred turns out to be a legal entity that provides services for sub-advisers who actually manage client money without having to hassle with administrative stuff … an “adviser” if you will by name only … an “Adviser for Hire.” To find addresses of the sub-advisers to these funds you must look to the SEC required fund documents, the prospectus or the statement of additional information (SAI).

Hunderfold Funds is sub-advised by Hunderfold Funds, LLC, which gives its sub-advisory fees to the Simply Distribute Charitable Foundation. Actually, the charity appears to own the sub-adviser. Who controls the charity? The people that control Spectrum Financial Inc., which is located, alas, in Virginia.

The SAI also reveals that the fund’s statutory trust is not administered by the adviser, Advisors Preferred, but by Gemini Funds Services, LLC. The trust itself is a so-called shared or “series trust” comprised of independent funds. Its name is Northern Lights Fund Trust II. (Ref. SEC summary.) The trust is incorporated in Delaware, like many statutory trusts, while Gemini is headquartered in New York.

Why use a series trust? According to Gemini, it’s cheaper. “Rising business costs along with the increased level of regulatory compliance … have magnified the benefits of joining a shared trust in contrast to the expenses associated with registering a standalone trust.”

How does Hundredfold pass this cost savings on to investors? SFHYX’s latest fact sheet shows a 3.80% expense ratio. This fee is not a one-time load or performance based; it is an annual expense.

OnTrack Funds is sub-advised by Price Capital Management, Inc, which is located in Florida. Per the SEC Filing, it actually is run out of a residence. Its latest fact sheet has the expense ratio for OTRFX at 2.95%, annually. With $130M AUM, this expense translates to $3.85M per year paid by investors the people at Price Capital (sub adviser), Gemini Funds (administrator), Advisors Preferred (adviser), Ceros Financial (distributer), and others.

What about the adviser itself, Advisors Preferred? It’s actually controlled by Ceros Financial Services, LLC, which is headquartered in Maryland. Ceros is wholly-owned by Ceros Holding AG, which is 95% owned by Copiaholding AG, which is wholly-owned by Franz Winklbauer.  Mr. Winklbauer is deemed to indirectly control the adviser. In 2012, Franz Winklbauer resigned as vice president of the administrative board from Ceros Holding AG. Copiaholding AG was formed in Switzerland.

Which is to say … who are all these people?

Where do they really work?

And, what do they really do?

Maybe these are related questions.

If it’s hard to figure out where advisers work, it’s probably hard to figure out what they actually do for the investors that pay them.

Guilty by affiliation
Further obfuscating adviser physical location is industry trend toward affiliation, if not outright consolidation. Take Affiliated Managers Group, or more specifically AMG Funds LLC, whose main office location is Connecticut, as registered with the SEC. It currently is the named adviser to more than 40 mutual funds with assets under management (AUM) totaling $42B, including:

• Managers Intermediate Duration Govt (MGIDX), sub advised by Amundi Smith Breeden LLC, located in North Carolina,
• Yacktman Service (YACKX), sub advised by Yacktman Asset Management, L.P. of Texas, and
• Brandywine Blue (BLUEX), sub advised by Friess Associates of Delaware, LLC, located in Delaware (fortunately) and Friess Associates LLC, located in Wyoming.

All of these funds are in process of being rebranded with the AMG name. No good deed goes unpunished?

AMG, Inc., the corporation that controls AMG Funds and is headquartered in Massachusetts, has minority or majority ownership in many other asset managers, both in the US and aboard. Below is a snapshot of US firms now “affiliated” with AMG. Note that some are themselves named advisers with multiple sub-advisers, like Aston.

AMG describes its operation as follows: “While providing our Affiliates with continued operational autonomy, we also help them to leverage the benefits of AMG’s scale in U.S. retail and global product distribution, operations and technology to enhance their growth and capabilities.”

Collectively, AMG boasts more than $600B in AUM. Time will tell whether its affiliates become controlled outright and re-branded, and more importantly, whether such affiliation ultimately benefits investors. It currently showcases full contact information of its affiliates, and affiliates like Aston showcase contact information of its sub-advisers.

Bottom line
Is Bill Smead correct when he claims separation from Wall Street gives his firm an edge? Does location matter to performance? Whether location influences fund performance remains an interesting question, but as part of your due diligence, there should be no confusion about knowing where your fund adviser (and sub-adviser) works.

Closing the capital gains season and thinking ahead

This fall Mark Wilson has launched Cap Gains Valet to help investors track and understand capital gains distributions. In addition to being Chief Valet, Mark is chief investment officer for The Tarbox Group in Newport Beach, CA. He is, they report, “one of only four people in the nation that has both the Certified Financial Planner® and Accredited Pension Administrator (APA) designations.” As the capital gains season winds down, we asked Mark if he’d put on his CIO hat for a minute and tell us what sense an investor should make of it all. Yeah, lots of folks got hammered in 2014 but that’s past. What, we asked, about 2015 and how we act in the year ahead? Here are Mark’s valedictory comments:

As 2014 comes to a close, so does capital gains season. After two straight months thinking about capital gains distributions for CapGainsValet.com, it is a great time for me to reflect on the website’s inaugural year.

At The Tarbox Group (my real job), our firm has been formally gathering capital gains estimates for the mutual funds and ETFs we use in client accounts for over 20 years. Strategizing around these distributions has been part of our year-end activities for so long I did not expect to learn much from gathering and making this information available. I was wrong. Here are some of the things I learned (or learned again) from this project:

• Checking capital gains estimates more than once is a good idea. I’m sure this has happened before, but this year we saw a number of funds “up” their estimates a more than once before their actual distribution date. Given that a handful of distributions doubled from their initial estimates, it is possible that having this more up-to-date information might necessitate a different strategy.
• Many mutual fund websites are terrible. Given the dollars managed and fees fund companies are collecting, there is no reason to have a website that looks like a bad elementary school project. Not having easily accessible capital gains estimates is excusable, but not having timely commentary, performance information, or contact information is not.
• Be wary of funds that have a shrinking asset base. This year I counted over 50 funds that distributed more than 20% of their NAV. The most common reason for the large distributions… funds that have fallen out of favor and have had huge redemptions. Unfortunately, shareholders that stick around often get stuck with the tax bill.
• Asset location is important. We found ourselves saying “good thing we own that in an IRA!” more than once this year. Owning actively managed funds in tax deferred accounts reduces stress, extra work and tax bills. Deciding which account to hold your fund can be as important a decision as which fund to hold.

CapGainsValet is “going dark” this week. Be on the lookout for our return in October or November. In the meantime, have a profitable 2015!

Fund companies explain their massive taxable distributions to us

Well, actually, most of them don’t.

I had the opportunity to chat with Jason Zweig as he prepared his year end story on how to make sense out of the recent state of huge capital gains distributions. In preparing in advance of my talk with Jason, I spent a little time gettin’ granular. I used Mark Wilson’s site to track down the funds with the most extraordinary distributions.

Cap Gains Valet identified a sort of “dirty dozen” of funds that paid out 30% or more of their NAV as taxable distributions. “Why on earth,” we innocently asked ourselves, “would they do that?” So we started calling and asking. In general, we discovered that fund advisers reacted to the question about the same way that you react to the discovery of curdled half-and-half in your coffee: with a wrinkled nose and irritated expression.

For those of you who haven’t been following the action, here’s our cap gains primer:

Capital gains are profits that result from the sales of appreciated securities in a portfolio. They come in two flavors: long-term capital gains, which result from the sale of stocks the fund has held for a while, and short-term gain gains, which usually result for the bad practice of churning the portfolio.

Even funds which have lost a lot of money can hit you with a capital gains tax bill. A fund might be down 40% year-to-date and if the only shares it sold were the Google shares it wangled at Google’s 2004 IPO, you could be hit with a tax bill for a large gain.

Two things trigger large taxable distributions: a new portfolio manager or portfolio strategy which requires cleaning out the old portfolio or forced redemptions because shareholders are bolting and the manager needs to sell stuff – often his best and most liquid stuff – to meet redemptions.

So, how did this Dirty Dozen make the list?

Neuberger Berman Large Cap Disciplined Growth (NBCIX, 53% distribution). I had a nice conversation with Neil Groom for Neuberger Berman. He was pretty clear about the problem: “we’ve struggled with performance,” and over 75% of the fund shares have been redeemed. The manager liquidates shares pro rata – that is, he sells them all down evenly – and “there are just no losses to offset those sales.” Neuberger is now underwriting the fund’s expenses to the tune of $300,000/year but remains committed to it for a couple reasons. One is that they see it as a core investment product. And the other is that the fund has had long winning streaks and long losing streaks in the past, both of which they view as a product of their discipline rather than as a failing by their manager.

We reached out to the folks at Russell LifePoints 2040 Strategy (RXLAX, 35% distribution) and Russell LifePoints 2050 Strategy (RYLRX, 33% distribution): after getting past the “what does it matter? These funds are held in tax-deferred retirement accounts” response – why is true but still doesn’t answer the question “why did this happen to you and not all target-date funds?” Russell’s Kate Stouffer reported that the funds “realized capital gains in 2014 predominantly as a result of the underlying fund reallocation that took place in August 2014.” The accompanying link showed Russell punting two weak Russell funds for two newly-launched Russell funds overseen by the same managers.

Turner Emerging Growth (TMCGX, 48% distribution), Midcap Growth (TMGFX, 42% distribution) and Small Cap Growth (TSCEX, 54% distribution): I called Turner directly and bounced around a bit before being told that “we don’t speak to the media. You’ll need to contact our media relations firm.” Suh-weet! I did. They promised to make some inquiries. Two weeks later, still no word. Two of the three funds have changed managers in the past year and Turner has seen a fair amount of asset outflows, which together might explain the problem.

Janus Forty (JDCAX, 33% distribution): about a half billion in outflows, a net loss in assets of about 75% from its peak plus a new manager in mid-2013 who might be reshaping the portfolio.

Eaton Vance Large-Cap Value (EHSTX, 29% distribution): new lead manager in mid-2014 plus an 80% decline in assets since 2010 led to it.

Nationwide HighMark Large Cap Growth (NWGLX, 42% distribution): another tale of mass redemption. The fund had $73 million in assets as of July 2013 when a new co-manager was added. The fund rose since then, but a lot less than its peers or its benchmark, investors decamped and the fund ended up with $40 million in December 2014.

Nuveen NWQ Large-Cap Value (NQCAX, 47% distribution) has been suffering mass redemptions – assets were $1.3 billion in mid-2013, $700 million in mid-2014, and $275 million at year’s end. The fund also had weak and inconsistent returns: bottom 10% of its peer group for the past 1, 3 and 5 years and far below average – about a 20% return over the current market cycle as compared to 38% for its large cap value peers – despite a couple good years.

Wells Fargo Small Cap Opportunities (NVSOX, 41% distribution) has a splendid record, low volatility, a track record for reasonably low payouts, a stable management team … and crashing assets. The fund held $700 million in October 2013, $470 million in March 2014 and $330 million in December 2014. With investment minimums of $1 million (Administrative share class) and $5 million (Institutional), the best we can say is that it’s nice to see rich people being stupid, too.

A couple of these funds are, frankly, bad. Most are mediocre. And a couple are really good but, seemingly, really unlucky. For investors in taxable accounts, their fate highlights an ugly reality: your success can be undermined by the behavior of your funds’ other investors. You really don’t want to be the last one out the door, which means you need to understand when others are heading out.

Hear “it’s a stock-pickers market”? Run quick … away

Not from the market necessarily, but from any dim bulb whose insight is limited not only by the need to repeat what others have said, but to repeat the dumbest things that others have said.

“Active management is oversold.” Run!

“Passive investing makes no sense to us or to our investors.” Run faster!

Ted, the discussion board’s indefatigable Linkster, pointed us at Henry Blodget’s recent essay “14 Meaningless Phrases That Will Make You Sound Like A Stock-Market Wizard” at his Business Insider site.  Yes, that Henry Blodget: the poster child for duplicitous stock “analysis” who was banned for life from the securities industry. He also had to “disgorge” $2 million in profits, a process that might or might not have involved a large bucket. In any case, he knows whereof he speaks.)  He pokes fun at “the trend is your friend” (phrased differently it would be “follow the herd, that’s always a wise course”) and “it’s a stockpicker’s market,” among other canards.

Chip, the Observer’s tech-crazed tech director, appreciated Blodget’s attempt but recommends an earlier essay: “Stupid Things Finance People Say” by Morgan Housel of Motley Fool. Why? “They cover the same ground. The difference is the he’s actually funny.”

Hmmm …

Blodget: “It’s not a stock market. It’s a market of stocks.” It sounds deeply profound — the sort of wisdom that can be achieved only through decades of hard work and experience. It suggests the speaker understands the market in a way that the average schmo doesn’t. It suggests that the speaker, who gets that the stock market is a “market of stocks,” will coin money while the average schmo loses his or her shirt.

Housel: “Earnings were positive before one-time charges.” This is Wall Street’s equivalent of, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

Blodget: “I’m cautiously optimistic.” A classic. Can be used in almost all circumstances and market conditions … It implies wise, prudent caution, but also a sunny outlook, which most people like.

Housel: “We’re cautiously optimistic.” You’re also an oxymoron.

Blodget: “Stocks are down on ‘profit taking.” …It sounds like you know what professional traders are doing, which makes you sound smart and plugged in. It doesn’t commit you to a specific recommendation or prediction. If the stock or market goes down again tomorrow, you can still have been right about the “profit taking.” If the stock or market goes up tomorrow, you can explain that traders are now “bargain hunting” (the corollary). Whether the seller is “taking a profit” — and you have no way of knowing — the buyer is at the same time placing a new bet on the stock. So collectively describing market activity as “profit taking” is ridiculous.

Housel: “The Dow is down 50 points as investors react to news of [X].” Stop it, you’re just making stuff up. “Stocks are down and no one knows why” is the only honest headline in this category.

Your pick.  Or try both for the same price!

Alternately, if you’re looking to pick up hot chicks as well as hot picks at your next Wall Street soiree, The Financial Times helpfully offered up “Strategist’s icebreakers serve up the season’s party from hell” (12/27/2014). They recommend chucking out the occasional “What’s all the fuss about the central banks?” Or you might try the cryptic, “Inflation isn’t keeping me up at night — for now.”

Top developments in fund industry litigation

Fundfox, launched in 2012, is the mutual fund industry’s only litigation intelligence service, delivering exclusive litigation information and real-time case documents neatly organized and filtered as never before. For a complete list of developments last month, and for information and court documents in any case, log in at www.fundfox.com and navigate to Fundfox Insider.

New Lawsuit

• The plaintiff in existing fee litigation regarding ten Russell funds filed a new complaint, covering a different damages period, that additionally adds a new section 36(b) claim for excessive administrative fees. (McClure v. Russell Inv. Mgmt. Co.)

Orders

• The court consolidated ERISA lawsuits regarding “stable value funds” offered by J.P. Morgan to 401(k) plan participants. (In re J.P. Morgan Stable Value Fund ERISA Litig.)
• The court preliminarily approved a $9.475 million settlement of an ERISA class action that challenged MassMutual‘s receipt of revenue-sharing payments from unaffiliated mutual funds. (Golden Star, Inc. v. Mass Mut. Life Ins. Co.)
• The court gave its final approval to the $22.5 million settlement of Regions Morgan Keegan ERISA litigation. Plaintiffs had alleged that defendants imprudently caused and permitted retirement plans to invest in (1) Regions common stock (“despite the dire financial problems facing the Company”), (2) certain bond funds (“heavily and imprudently concentrated and invested in high-risk structured finance products”), and (3) the RMK Select Funds (“despite the fact that they incurred unreasonably expensive fees and were selected . . . solely to benefit Regions”). (In re Regions Morgan Keegan ERISA Litig.)

Briefs

• The plaintiff filed a reply brief in her appeal to the Eighth Circuit regarding gambling-related securities held by the American Century Ultra Fund. Defendants include independent directors. (Seidl v. Am. Century Cos.)
• In the ERISA class action alleging that TIAA-CREF failed to honor redemption and transfer requests in a timely fashion, the plaintiff filed her opposition to TIAA-CREF’s motion to dismiss. (Cummings v. TIAA-CREF.)

Amended Complaints

• Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint in the consolidated fee litigation regarding the Davis N.Y. Venture Fund: “The investment advisory fee rate charged to the Fund is as much as 96% higher than the rates negotiated at arm’s length by Davis with other clients for the same or substantially the same investment advisory services.” (In re Davis N.Y. Venture Fund Fee Litig.)
• Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint in the consolidated fee litigation regarding the Harbor International and and High-Yield Bond Funds: “Defendant charges investment advisory fees to each of the Funds that include a mark-up of more than 80% over the fees paid by Defendant to the Subadvisers who provide substantially all of the investment advisory services required by the Funds.” (Zehrer v. Harbor Capital Advisors, Inc.)

The Alt Perspective: Commentary and news from DailyAlts.

By Brian Haskins, editor of DailyAlts.com

As they say out here in Hollywood, that’s a wrap. Now we can close the books on 2014 and take a look at some of the trends that emerged over the year, and make a few projections about what might be in store for 2015. So let’s jump in.

Early in 2014, it was clear that assets were flowing strongly into liquid alternatives, with twelve-month growth rates hovering around 40% for most of the first half of the year. While the growth rates declined as the year went on, it was clear that 2014 was a real turning point in both asset growth and new fund launches. In total, more than $26 billion of net new assets flowed into the category over the past twelve months.

Three of the categories that garnered the most new asset flows were non-traditional bonds, long/short equity and multi-alternative strategies. Each of these makes sense, as follows:

• Non-traditional bonds provide a hedge against a rise in interest rates, so investors naturally were looking for a way to avoid what was initially thought to be a sure thing in 2014 – rising rates. As we know, that turned not to be the case, and instead we saw a fairly steady decline in rates over the year. Nonetheless, investors who flowed into these funds should be well positioned should rates rise in 2015.
• On the equity side, long/short equity provides a hedge against a decline in the equity markets, and here again investors looked to position their portfolios more conservatively given the long bull run. As a result, long/short equity funds saw strong inflows for most of the year with the exception of the $11.9 billion MainStay Marketfield Fund (MFLDX) which experienced more than $5 billion of outflows over eight straight months on the back of a difficult performance period. As my old boss would say, they have gone from the penthouse to the doghouse. But with nearly $12 billion remaining in the fund and a 1.39% management fee, their doghouse probably isn’t too bad.
• Finally, investors favored multi-alternative funds steadily during the year. These funds provide an easy one-stop-shop for making an allocation to alternatives, and for many investors and financial advisors, these funds are a solid solution since they package multiple alternative investment strategies into one fund. I would expect to see multi-alternative funds continue to play a dominant role in portfolios over the next few years while the industry becomes more comfortable with evaluating and allocating to single strategy funds.

Now that the year has come to a close, we can take a step back and look at 2014 from a big picture perspective. Here are five key trends that I saw emerge over the year:

1. The conversion of hedge funds into mutual funds – This is an interesting trend that will likely continue, and gain even more momentum in 2015. There are a few reasons why this is likely. First, raising assets in hedge funds has become more difficult over the past five years. Institutional investors allocate a bulk of their assets to well-known hedge fund managers, and performance isn’t the top criteria for making the allocations. Second, investing in hedge funds involves the review of a lot of non-standard paperwork, including fee agreements and other terms. This creates a high barrier to entry for smaller investors. Thus, the mutual fund vehicle is a much easier product to use for gathering assets with smaller investors in both the retail and institutional channels. As a result, we will see many more hedge fund conversions in the coming years. Third, the track record and the assets of a hedge fund are portable over to a mutual fund. This gives new mutual funds that convert from a hedge fund a head start over all other new funds.
2. The re-emergence of managed futures funds – A divergence in global economic policies among central banks created more opportunities for managers that look for asset prices that move in opposite directions. Managed futures managers do just that, and 2014 proved to be the first year in many where they were able to put positive, double digit returns on the board. It is likely that 2015 will be another solid year for these strategies as strong price trends will likely continue with global interest rates, currencies, commodity prices and other assets over the year.
3. More well-known hedge fund managers are getting into the liquid alternatives business – It’s hard to resist strong asset flows if you are an asset manager, and as discussed above, the asset flows into liquid alternatives have been strong. And expectations are that they will continue to be strong. So why wouldn’t a decent hedge fund manager want to get in the game and diversify their business away from institutional and high net worth assets. Some of the top hedge fund managers are recognizing this and getting into the space, and as more do, it will become even more acceptable for those who haven’t.
4. A continued increase in the use of alternative beta strategies, and the introduction of more complex alternative beta funds – Alternative beta (or smart beta) strategies give investors exposure to specific “factors” that have otherwise not been easy to obtain historically. With the introduction of alternative beta funds, investors can now fine tune their portfolio with specific allocations to low or high volatility stocks, high yielding stocks, high momentum stocks, high or low quality stocks, etc. A little known secret is that factor exposures have historically explained more of an active manager’s excess returns (returns above a benchmark) than individual stock selection. With the advent of alternative beta funds in both the mutual fund and ETF format, investors have the ability to build more risk efficient portfolios or turn the knobs in ways they haven’t been able to in the past.
5. An increase in the number of alternative ETFs – While mutual funds have a lower barrier to entry for investors than hedge funds, ETFs are even more ubiquitous. Nearly every ETF can be purchased in nearly every brokerage account. Not so for mutual funds. The biggest barrier to seeing more alternative ETFs has historically been the fact that most alternative strategies are actively managed. This is slowly changing as more systematic “hedge fund” approaches are being developed, along with alternative ETFs that invest in other ETFs to gain their underlying long and short market exposures. Expect to see this trend continue in 2015.

There is no doubt that 2015 will bring some surprises, but by definition we don’t know what those are today. We will keep you posted as the year progresses, and in the meantime, Happy New Year and all the best for a prosperous 2015!

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.

RiverPark Large Growth (RPXFX/RPXIX): it’s a discipline that works. Find the forces that will consistently drive growth in the years ahead.  Do intense research to identify great firms that are best positioned to reap enduring gains from them. Wait. Wait. Wait. Then buy them when they’re cheap. It’s worked well, except for that pesky “get investors to notice” piece.

River Park Large Growth Conference Call Highlights

On December 17th we spoke for an hour with Mitch Rubin, manager of RiverPark Large Growth (RPXFX/RPXIX), Conrad van Tienhoven, his long-time associate, and Morty Schaja, CEO of RiverPark Funds. About 20 readers joined us on the call.

Here’s a brief recap of the highlights:

• The managers have 20 years’ experience running growth portfolios, originally with Baron Asset Management and now with RiverPark. That includes eight mutual funds and a couple hedge funds.
• Across their portfolios, the strategy has been the same: identify long-term secular trends that are likely to be enduring growth drivers, do really extensive fundamental research on the firm and its environment, and be patient before buying (the target is paying less than 15-times earnings for companies growing by 20% or more) or selling (which is mostly just rebalancing within the portfolio rather than eliminating names from the portfolio).
• In the long term, the strategy works well. In the short term, sometimes less so. They argue for time arbitrage. Investors tend to underreact to changes which are strengthening firms. They’ll discount several quarters of improved performance before putting a stock on their radar screen, then may hesitate for a while longer before convincing themselves to act. By then, the stock may already have priced-in much of the potential gains. Rubin & co. try to track firms and industries long enough that they can identify the long-term winners and buy during their lulls in performance.

In the long term, the system works. The fund has returned 20% annually over the past three years. It’s four years old and had top decile performance in the large cap growth category after the first three years.

Then we spent rather a lot of time on the ugly part.

In relative terms, 2014 was wretched for the fund. The fund returned about 5.5% for the year, which meant it trailed 93% of its peers. It started the year with a spiffy five-star rating and ended with three. So, the question was, what happened?

Mitch’s answer was presented with, hmmm … great energy and conviction. There was a long stretch in there where I suspect he didn’t take a breath and I got the sense that he might have heard this question before. Still, his answer struck me as solid and well-grounded. In the short term, the time arbitrage discipline can leave them in the dust. In 2014, the fund was overweight in a number of underperforming arenas: energy E&P companies, gaming companies and interest rate victims.

• Energy firms: 13% of the portfolio, about a 2:1 overweight. Four high-quality names with underlevered balance sheets and exposure to the Marcellus shale deposits. Fortunately for consumers and unfortunately for producers, rising production, difficulties in selling US natural gas on the world market and weakening demand linked to a spillover from Russia’s travails have caused prices to crater.
  
  The fundamental story of rising demand for natural gas, abetted by better US access to the world energy market, is unchanged. In the interim, the portfolio companies are using their strong balance sheets to acquire assets on the cheap.

• Gaming firms: gaming in the US, with regards to Ol’ Blue Eyes and The Rat Pack, is the past. Gaming in Asia, they argue, is the future. The Chinese central government has committed to spending nearly a half trillion dollars on infrastructure projects, including $100 billion/year on access, in and around the gambling enclave of Macau. Chinese gaming (like hedge fund investing here) has traditionally been dominated by the ultra-rich, but gambling is culturally entrenched and the government is working to make it available to the mass affluent in China (much like liquid alt investing here). About 200 million Chinese travel abroad on vacation each year. On average, Chinese tourists spend a lot more in the casinos and a lot more in attendant high-end retail than do Western tourists. In the short term, President Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has precipitated “a vast purge” among his political opponents and other suspiciously-wealthy individuals. Until “the urge to purge” passes, high-rolling gamblers will be few and discreet. Middle class gamblers, not subject to such concerns, will eventually dominate. Just not yet.
• Interest rate victims: everyone knew, in January 2014, that interest rates were going to rise. Oops. Those continuingly low rates punish firms that hold vast cash stakes (think “Google” with its $50 billion bank account or Schwab with its huge network of money market accounts). While Visa and MasterCard’s stock is in the black for 2014, gains are muted by the lower rates they can charge on accounts and the lower returns on their cash flow.

Three questions came up:

• Dan Schein asked about the apparent tension between the managers’ commitment to a low turnover discipline and the reported 33-40% turnover rate. Morty noted that you need to distinguish between “name turnover” (that is, firms getting chucked out of the portfolio) and rebalancing. The majority of the fund’s turnover is simple internal rebalancing as the managers trim richly appreciated positions and add to underperforming ones. Name turnover is limited to two or three positions a year, with 70% of the names in the current portfolio having been there since inception.
• I asked about the extent of international exposure in the portfolio, which Morningstar reports at under 2%. Mitch noted that they far preferred to invest in firms operating under US accounting requirements (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and U.S. securities regulations, which made them far more reliable and transparent. On the other hand, the secular themes which the managers pursue (e.g., the rise of mobile computing) are global and so they favor U.S.-based firms with strong global presence. By their estimate, two thirds of the portfolio firms derive at least half of their earnings growth from outside the US and most of their firms derived 40-50% of earnings internationally; Priceline is about 75%, Google and eBay around 60%. Direct exposure to the emerging markets comes mainly from Visa and MasterCard, plus Schlumberger’s energy holdings.
• Finally I asked what concern they had about volatility in the portfolio. Their answer was that they couldn’t predict and didn’t worry about stock price volatility. They were concerned about what they referred to as “business case volatility,” which came down to the extent to which a firm could consistently generate free cash from recurring revenue streams (e.g., the fee MasterCard assesses on every point-of-sale transaction) without resorting to debt or leverage.

For folks interested but unable to join us, here’s the complete audio of the hour-long conversation.

The RPXFX Conference Call

As with all of these funds, we’ve created a new Featured Funds page for RiverPark Large Growth Fund, pulling together all of the best resources we have for the fund.

Conference Calls Upcoming

We anticipate three conference calls in the next three months and we would be delighted by your company on each of them. We’re still negotiating dates with the managers, so for now we’ll limit ourselves to a brief overview and a window of time.

At base, we only do conference calls when we think we’ve found really interesting people for you to talk with. That’s one of the reasons we do only a few a year.

Here’s the prospective line-up for winter.

Bernard Horn is manager of Polaris Global Value (PGVFX) and sub-adviser to a half dozen larger funds. Mr. Horn is president of Polaris Capital Management, LLC, a Boston-based global and international value equity firm. Mr. Horn founded Polaris in 1995 and launched the Global Value Fund in 1998. Today, Polaris manages more than $5 billion for 30 clients include rich folks, institutions and mutual and hedge funds. There’s a nice bio of Mr. Horn at the Polaris Capital site.

Why talk with Mr. Horn? Three things led us to it. First, Polaris Global is really good and really small. After 16 years, it’s a four- to five-star fund with just $280 million in assets. He seems just a bit abashed by that (“we’re kind of bad at marketing”) but also intent on doing right for his shareholders rather than getting rich. Second, his small cap international fund (Pear Tree Polaris Foreign Value Small Cap QUSOX) is, if anything, better and it trawls the waters where active management actually has the greatest success. Finally, Ed and I have a great conversation with him in November. Ed and I are reasonably judgmental, reasonably well-educated and reasonably cranky. And still we came away from the conversation deeply impressed, as much by Mr. Horn’s reflections on his failures as much as by his successes. There’s a motto often misattributed to the 87 year old Michelangelo: Ancora imparo, “I am still learning.” We came away from the conversation with a sense that you might say the same about Mr. Horn.

Matthew Page and Ian Mortimer are co-managers of Guinness Atkinson Global Innovators (IWIRX) and Guinness Atkinson Dividend Builder (GAINX), both of which we’ve profiled in the past year. Dr. Mortimer is trained as a physicist, with a doctorate from Oxford. He began at Guinness as an analyst in 2006 and became a portfolio manager in 2011. Mr. Page (the friendly looking one over there->) earned a master’s degree in physics from Oxford and somehow convinced the faculty to let him do his thesis on finance: “Financial Markets as Complex Dynamical Systems.” Nice trick! He spent a year with Goldman Sachs, joined Guinness in 2005 and became a portfolio co-manager in 2006.

Why might you want to hear from the guys? At one level, they’re really successful. Five star rating on IWIRX, great performance in 2014 (also 2012 and 2013), laughably low downside capture over those three years (almost all of their volatility is to the upside), and a solid, articulated portfolio discipline. In 2014, Lipper recognized IWIRX has the best global equity fund of the preceding 15 years and they still can’t attract investors. It’s sort of maddening. Part of the problem might be the fact that they’re based in London, which makes relationship-building with US investors a bit tough. At another level, like Mr. Horn, I’ve had great conversations with the guys. They’re good listeners, sharp and sometimes witty. I enjoyed the talks and learned from them.

David Berkowitz will manage the new RiverPark Focused Value Fund once it launches at the end of March. Mr. Berkowitz earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in chemical engineering at MIT before getting an MBA at that other school in Cambridge. In 1992, Mr. Berkowitz and his Harvard classmate William Ackman set up the Gotham Partners hedge fund, which drew investments from legendary investors such as Seth Klarman, Michael Steinhardt and Whitney Tilson. Berkowitz helped manage the fund until 2002, when they decided to close the fund, and subsequently managed money for a New York family office, the Festina Lente hedge fund (hmmm … “Make haste slowly,” the family motto of the Medicis among others) and for Ziff Brother Investments, where he was a Partner as well as the Chief Risk and Strategy Officer. He’s had an interesting, diverse career and Mr. Schaja speaks glowingly of him. We’re hopeful of speaking with Mr. Berkowitz in March.

Would you like to join in?

It’s very simple. In February we’ll post exact details about the time and date plus a registration link for each call. The calls cost you nothing, last exactly one hour and will give you the chance to ask the managers a question if you’re so moved. It’s a simple phone call with no need to have access to a tablet, wifi or anything.

Alternately, you can join the conference call notification list. One week ahead of each call we’ll email you a reminder and a registration link.

Launch Alert: Cambria Global Momentum & Global Asset Allocation

Cambria Funds recently launched two ETFs, as promised by its CIO Mebane Faber, who wants to “disrupt the traditional high fee mutual fund and hedge fund business, mostly through launching ETFs.” The line-up is now five funds with assets under management totaling more than $350M:

• Cambria Shareholder Yield ETF (SYLD)
• Cambria Foreign Shareholder Yield ETF (FYLD)
• Cambria Global Value ETF (GVAL)
• Cambria Global Momentum ETF (GMOM)
• Cambria Global Asset Allocation ETF (GAA)

We wrote about the first three in “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering Beta” this past May. SYLD is now the largest actively managed ETF among the nine categories in Morningstar’s equity fund style box (small value to large growth). It’s up 12% this year and 32% since its inception May 2013.

GMOM and GAA are the two newest ETFs. Both are fund of funds.

GMOM is based on Mebane’s definitive paper “A Quantitative Approach To Tactical Asset Allocation” and popular book “The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets.” It appears to be an in-house version of AdvisorShares Cambria Global Tactical ETF (GTAA), which Cambria stopped sub-advising this past June. Scott, a frequent and often profound contributor to our discussion board, describes GTAA in one word: “underwhelming.” (You can find follow some of the debate here.) The new version GMOM sports a much lower expense ratio, which can only help. Here is link to fact sheet.

GAA is something pretty cool. It is an all-weather strategic asset allocation fund constructed for global exposure across diverse asset classes, but with lower volatility than your typical long term target allocation fund. It is a “one fund for a lifetime” offering. (See DailyAlts “Meb Faber on the Genesis of Cambria’s Global Tactical ETF.”) It is the first ETF to have a permanent 0% management fee. Its annual expense ratio is 0.29%. From its prospectus:

Here’s is link to fact sheet, and below is snapshot of current holdings:

In keeping with the theme that no good deed goes unpunished. Chuck Jaffe referenced GAA in his annual “Lump of Coal Awards” series. Mr. Jaffe warned “investors should pay attention to the total expense ratio, because that’s what they actually pay to own a fund or ETF.” Apparently, he was irked that the media focused on the zero management fee. We agree that it was pretty silly of reporters, members of Mr. Jaffe’s brotherhood, to focus so narrowly on a single feature of the fund and at the same time celebrate the fact that Mr. Faber’s move lowers the expenses that investors would otherwise bear.

Launch Alert: ValueShares International Quantitative Value

Wesley Gray announced the launch of ValueShares International Quantitative Value ETF (IVAL) on 19 December, his firm’s second active ETF. IVAL is the international sister to ValueShares Quantitative Value ETF (QVAL), which MFO profiled in December. Like QVAL, IVAL seeks the cheapest, highest quality value stocks … within the International domain. These stocks are selected in quant fashion based on value and quality criteria grounded in investing principles first outlined by Ben Graham and validated empirically through academic research.

The concentrated portfolio currently invests in 50 companies across 14 countries. Here’s breakout:

As with QVAL, there is no sector diversification constraint or, in this case, country constraint. Japan dominates current portfolio. Once candidate stocks pass the capitalization, liquidity, and quality screens, value is king.

Notice too no Russia or Brazil.

Wesley explains: “We only trade in liquid tradeable names where front-running issues are minimized. We also look at the custodian costs. Russia and Brazil are insane on both the custodial costs and the frontrunning risks so we don’t trade ’em. In the end, we’re trading in developed/developing markets. Frontier/emerging don’t meet our criteria.”

Here is link to IVAL overview. Dr. Gray informs us that the new fund’s expense ratio has just been reduced by 20bps to 0.79%.

Launch Alert: Pear Tree Polaris Small Cap Fund (USBNX/QBNAX)

On January 1, a team from Polaris Capital assumed control of the former Pear Tree Columbia Small Cap Fund, which has now been rechristened. For the foreseeable future, the fund’s performance record will bear the imprint of the departed Columbia team.  The Columbia team had been in place since the middle 1990s and the fund has, for years, been a study in mediocrity.  We mean that in the best possible way: it rarely cratered, it rarely soared and it mostly trailed the pack by a bit. By Morningstar’s calculation, the compounding effect of almost always losing by a little ended up being monumental: the fund trailed more than 90% of its peers for the past 1, 3, 5, and 10 year periods while trailing two-thirds over them over the past 15 years.

Which is to say, your statistical screens are not going to capture the fund’s potential going forward.

We think you should look at the fund, and hope to ask Mr. Horn about it on a conference call with him.  Here are the three things you need to know about USNBX if you’re in the market for a small cap fund:

• The management team here also runs Pear Tree Polaris Foreign Value Small Cap Fund (QUSOX / QUSIX) which has earned both five stars from Morningstar and a Great Owl designation from the Observer.
• The new subadvisory agreement pays Polaris 20 basis points less than Columbia received, which will translate into lower expenses that investors pay.
• The portfolio will be mostly small cap ($100 million – $5 billion) US stocks but they’ve got a global watch-list of 500 names which are candidates for inclusion and they have the ability to hedge the portfolio. The foreign version of the fund has been remarkable in its ability to manage risk: they typically capture one-third as much downside risk as their peers while capturing virtually all of the upside.

The projected expense ratio is 1.44%. The minimum initial investment is $2500, reduced to $1000 for tax-advantaged accounts and for those set up with an automatic investing plan. Pear Tree has not, as of January 1, updated the fund’s webpage is reflect the change but you should consider visiting Pear Tree’s homepage next week to see what they have to say about the upgrade.  We’ll plan profiles of both funds in the months ahead.

Funds in Registration

Yikes. We’ve never before had a month like this: there’s only one new, no-load retail fund on file with the SEC. Even if we expand the search to loaded funds, we only get to four or five.  Hmmm …

The one fund is RiverPark Focused Value Fund. It will be primarily a large cap domestic equity fund whose manager has a particular interest in “special situations” such as spin-offs or reorganizations and on firms whose share prices might have cratered. They’ll buy if it’s a high quality firm and if the stock trades at a substantial discount to intrinsic value. It will be managed by a well-known member of the hedge fund community, David Berkowitz.

Manager Changes

This month also saw an uptick in manager turnover; 73 funds reported changes, about 50% more than the month before. The most immediately noticeable of which was Bill Frels’ departure from Mairs & Power Growth (MPGFX) and Mairs & Power Balanced (MAPOX) after 15 and 20 years, respectively. They’re both remarkable funds: Balanced has earned five stars from Morningstar for the past 3, 5, 10 and since inception periods while Growth has either four or five stars for all those periods. Both invest primarily in firms located in the upper Midwest and both have negligible turnover.

Mr. Frels’ appointment occasioned considerable anxiety years ago because he was an unknown guy replacing an investing legend, George Mairs. At the time, we counseled calm because Mairs & Power had themselves calmly and deliberately planned for the handout.  I suppose we’ll do the same today, though we might use this as an excuse for calling M&P to update our 2011 profile of the fund. That profile, written just as M&P appointed a co-manager in what we said was evidence of succession planning, concluded “If you’re looking for a core holding, especially for a smaller portfolio where the reduced minimum will help, this has to be on the short-list of the most attractive balanced funds in existence.”  We were right and we don’t see any reason to alter that conclusion now.

Updates

Andrew Foster and the folks at Seafarer Partners really are consistently better communicators than almost any of their peers.  In addition to a richly informative website and portfolio metrics that almost no one else thinks to share, they have just published a semi-annual report with substantial content.

Two arguments struck me.  First, the fund’s performance was hampered by their decision to avoid bad companies:

the Fund’s lack of exposure to small and mid-size technology companies – mostly located in Taiwan – caused it to lag the benchmark during the market’s run-up. While interesting investments occasionally surface among the sea of smaller technology firms located in and around Taipei, this group of companies in general is not distinguished by sustainable growth. Most companies make components for consumer electronics or computers, and while some grow quickly for a while, often their good fortune is not sustainable, as their products are rapidly commoditized, or as technological evolution renders their products obsolete. Their share prices can jump rapidly higher for a time when their products are in vogue. Nevertheless, I rarely find much that is worthwhile or sustainable in this segment of the market, though there are sometimes exceptions.

As a shareholder in the fund, I really do applaud a discipline that avoids those iffy but easy short-term bets.

The second argument is more interesting and a lot more important for the investing community. Andrew argues that “value investing” might finally be coming to the emerging markets.

Yet even as the near-term is murky, I believe the longer-term outlook has recently come into sharper focus. A very important structural change – one that I think has been a long time in coming – has just begun to reshape the investment landscape within the developing world. I think the consequence of this change will play out over the next decade, at a minimum.

For the past sixteen years, I have subscribed to an investment philosophy that stresses “growth” over “value.” By “value,” I mean an investment approach that places its primary emphasis on the inherent cheapness of a company’s balance sheet, and which places secondary weight on the growth prospect of the company’s income statement..

In the past, I have had substantial doubts as to whether a classic “value” strategy could be effectively implemented within the developing world – “value” seemed destined to become a “value trap.”  … In order to realize the value embedded in a cheap balance sheet, a minority investor must often invest patiently for an extended period, awaiting the catalyst that will ultimately unlock the value.

The problem with waiting in the developing world is that most countries lack sufficient legal, financial, accounting and regulatory standards to protect minority investors from abuse by “control parties.” A control party is the dominant owner of a given company. Without appropriate safeguards, minorities have little hope of avoiding exploitation while they wait; nor do they have sufficient legal clout to exert pressure on the control party to accelerate the realization of value. Thus in the past, a prospective “value” investment was more likely to be a “trap” than a source of long-term return.

Andrew’s letter outlines a series of legal and structural changes which seem to be changing that parlous state and he talks about the implications for his portfolio and, by extension, for yours. You should go read the letter.

Seafarer Growth & Income (SFGIX) is closing in on its third anniversary (February 15, 2015) with $122 million in assets and a splendid record, both in terms of returns and risk-management. The fund finished 2014 with a tiny loss but a record better than 75% of its peers.  We’re hopeful of speaking with Andrew and his team as they celebrate that third anniversary.

Speaking of third anniversaries, Grandeur Peak funds have just celebrated theirs. Their success has been amazing, at least to the folks who weren’t paying attention to their record in their preceding decade.  Eric Heufner, the firm’s president, shared some of the highlights in a December email:

… our initial Funds have reached the three-year milestone.  Both Funds ranked in the Top 1% of their respective Morningstar peer groups for the 3 years ending 10/31/14, and each delivered an annualized return of more than 20% over the period. The Grandeur Peak Global Opportunities Fund was the #1 fund in the Morningstar World Stock category and the Grandeur Peak International Opportunities Fund was the #2 fund in the Morningstar Foreign Small/Mid Growth category.  We also added two new strategies over the past year 18 months.  [He shared a performance table which comes down to this: all of the funds are top 10% or better for the available measurement periods.] 

Our original team of 7 has now grown to a team of 30 (16 full-time & 14 part-time).  Our assets under management have grown to $2.4 billion, and all four of our strategies are closed to additional investment—we remain totally committed to keeping our portfolios nimble.  We still plan to launch other Funds, but nothing is imminent.

And, too, their discipline strikes me as entirely admirable: all four of their funds have now been hard-closed in accordance with plans that they announced early and clearly. 2015 should see the launch of their last three funds, each of which was also built-in early to the firm’s planning and capacity calculations.

Finally, Matthews Asia Strategic Income (MAINX) celebrated its third anniversary and first Morningstar rating in December, 2014. The fund received a four-star rating against a “world bond” peer group. For what interest it holds, that rating is mostly meaningless since the fund’s mandate (Asia! Mostly emerging) and portfolio (just 70% bonds plus income-producing equities and convertibles) are utterly distant from what you see in the average world bond fund. The fund has crushed the one or two legitimate competitors in the space, its returns have been strong and its manager, Teresa Kong, comes across a particularly smart and articulate.

Briefly Noted . . .

Investors have, as predicted, chucked rather more than a billion dollars into Bill Gross’s new charge, Janus Unconstrained Bond (JUCAX) fund. Despite holding 75% of that in cash, Gross has managed both to lose money and underperform his peers in these opening months.  Both are silly observations, of course, though not nearly so silly as the desperate desire to rush a billion into Gross’s hands.

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

Effective January 1, 2015, Perkins Small Cap Value Fund (JDSAX) reopened to new investors. I’m a bit ambivalent here. The fund looks sluggish when measured by the usual trailing periods (it has trailed about 90% of its peers over the past 3 and 5 year periods) but I continue to think that those stats mislead as often as they inform since they capture a fund’s behavior in a very limited set of market conditions. If you look at the fund’s performance over the current market cycle – from October 1 2007 to now – it has returned 78% which handily leads its peers’ 61% gain. Nonetheless the team is making adjustments which include spending down their cash (from 15% to 5%), which is a durned odd for a value discipline focused on high quality firms to do. They’re also dropping the number of names and adding staff. It has been a very fine fund over the long term but this feels just a bit twitchy.

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

A couple unusual cases here.

Aegis High Yield Fund (AHYAX/AHYFX) closed to new investors in mid-December and has “assumed a temporary defensive position.” (The imagery is disturbing.) As we note below, this might well signal an end to the fund.

The more striking closure is GL Beyond Income Fund (GLBFX). While the fund is tiny, the mess is huge. It appears that Beyond Income’s manager, Daniel Thibeault (pronounced “tee-bow”), has been inventing non-existent securities then investing in them. Such invented securities might constitute a third of the fund’s portfolio. In addition, he’s been investing in illiquid securities – that is, stuff that might exist but whose value cannot be objectively determined and which cannot be easily sold. In response to the fraud, the manager has been arrested and charged with one count of fraud.  More counts are certainly pending but conviction just on the one original charge could carry a 20-year prison sentence. Since the board has no earthly idea of what the fund’s portfolio is worth, they’ve suspended all redemptions in the fund as well as all purchased. 

GL Beyond Income (it’s certainly sounding awfully ironic right now, isn’t it?) was one of two funds that Mr. Thibeault ran. The first fund, GL Macro Performance Fund (GLMPX), liquidated in July after booking a loss of nearly 50%. Like Beyond Income, it invested in a potpourri of “alternative investments” including private placements and loans to other organizations controlled by the manager.

There have been two pieces of really thoughtful writing on the crime. Investment News dug up a lot of the relevant information and background in a very solid story by Mason Braswell on December 30^th.  Chuck Jaffe approached the story as an illustration of the unrecognized risks that retail investors take as they move toward “liquid alts” funds which combine unusual corporate structures (the GL funds were interval funds, meaning that you could not freely redeem your shares) and opaque investments.

Morningstar, meanwhile, remains thoughtfully silent.  They seem to have reprinted Jaffe’s story but their own coverage of the fraud and its implications has been limited to two one-sentence notes on their Advisor site.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

Effective January 1, 2015, the name of the AIT Global Emerging Markets Opportunities Fund (VTGIX) changed to the Vontobel Global Emerging Markets Equity Institutional Fund.

American Century One Choice 2015 Portfolio has reached the end of its glidepath and is combining with One Choice In Retirement. That’s not really a liquidation, more like a long-planned transition.

Effective January 30, 2015, the name of the Brandes Emerging Markets Fund (BEMAX) will be changed to the Brandes Emerging Markets Value Fund.

At the same time that Brandes gains value, Calamos loses it. Effective March 1, Calamos Opportunistic Value Fund (CVAAX) becomes plain ol’ Calamos Opportunistic Fund and its benchmark will change from Russell 1000 Value to the S&P 500. Given that the fund is consistently inept, one could imagine calling for new managers … except for the fact that the fund is managed by the firm’s founder and The Gary Black.

Columbia Global Equity Fund (IGLGX) becomes Columbia Select Global Equity Fund on or about January 15, 2015. At that point Threadneedle International Advisers LLC takes over and it becomes a focused fund (though no one is saying how focused or focused on what?).

Effective January 1, 2015, Ivy International Growth Fund (IVINX) has changed to Ivy Global Growth Fund. Even before the change, over 20% of the portfolio was invested in the US.

PIMCO EqS^® Dividend Fund (PQDAX) became PIMCO Global Dividend Fund on December 31, 2014.

Effective February 28, 2015, Stone Ridge U.S. Variance Risk Premium Fund (VRLIX) will change its name to Stone Ridge U.S. Large Cap Variance Risk Premium Fund.

Effective December 29, 2014, the T. Rowe Price Retirement Income Fund has changed its name to the T. Rowe Price Retirement Balanced Fund.

The two week old Vertical Capital Innovations MLP Energy Fund (VMLPX) has changed its name to the Vertical Capital MLP & Energy Infrastructure Fund.

Voya Strategic Income Fund has become Voya Strategic Income Opportunities Fund. I’m so glad. I was worried that they were missing opportunities, so this reassures me. Apparently their newest opportunities lie in being just a bit more aggressive than a money market fund, since they’ve adopted the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Dollar Three-Month LIBOR Constant Maturity Index as their new benchmark. Not to say this is an awfully low threshold, but that index has returned 0.34% annually from inception in 2010 through the end of 2014.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Aberdeen Core Fixed Income Fund (PCDFX) will be liquidated on February 12, 2015.

Aegis High Yield Fund (AHYAX/AHYFX) hard-closed in mid-December. Given the fund’s size ($36 million) and track record, we’re thinking it’s been placed in a hospice though that hasn’t been announced. Here’s the 2014 picture:

AllianzGI Opportunity (POPAX) is getting axed. The plan is to merge the $90 million small cap fund into its $7 million sibling, AllianzGI Small-Cap Blend Fund (AZBAX). AZBAX has a short track record, mostly of hugging its index, but that’s a lot better than hauling around the one-star rating and dismal 10 year record that the larger fund’s managers inherited in 2013. They also didn’t improve upon the record. The closing date of the Reorganization is expected to be on or about March 9, 2015, although the Reorganization may be delayed.

Alpine Global Consumer Growth Fund (AWCAX) has closed and will, pending shareholder approval, be terminated in early 2015. Given that the vast majority of the fund’s shares (70% of the retail and 95% of the institutional shares) are owned by the family of Alpine’s founder, Sam Leiber, I’ve got a feeling that the shareholder vote is a done deal.

The dizzingly bad Birmiwal Oasis Fund (BIRMX) is being put out of manager Kailash Birmiwal’s misery. From 2003 – 07, the fund turned $10,000 into $67,000 and from 2007 – present it turned that $67,000 back into $21,000. All the while turning the portfolio at 2000% a year. Out of curiosity, I went back and reviewed the board of trustee’s decision to renew Mr. Birmiwal’s management contract in light of the fund’s performance. The trustees soberly noted that the fund had underperformed its benchmark and peers for the past 1-, 5-, 10-year and since inception periods but that “performance compared to its benchmark was competitive since the Fund’s inception which was reflective of the quality of the advisory services, including research, trade execution, portfolio management and compliance, provided by the Adviser.” I’m not even sure what that sentence means. In the end, they shrugged and noted that since Mr. B. owned more than 75% of the fund’s shares, he was probably managing it “to the best of his ability.”

I’m mentioning that not to pick on the decedent fund. Rather, I wanted to offer an example of the mental gymnastics that “independent” trustees frequently go through in order to reach a preordained conclusion.

The $75 million Columbia International Bond fund (CNBAX) has closed and will disappear at the being of February, 2015.

DSM Small-Mid Cap Growth Fund (DSMQZ/DSMMX) was liquidated and terminated on short notice at the beginning of December, 2014.

EP Strategic US Equity (EPUSX) and EuroPac Hard Asset (EPHAX) are two more lost lambs subject to “termination, liquidation and dissolution,” both on January 8^th, 2015.

Fidelity trustees unanimously approved the merge of Fidelity Fifty (FFTYX) into Fidelity Focused Stock (FTGQX). Not to point out the obvious but they have the same manager and near-identical 53 stock portfolios already. Shareholders will vote in spring and after baaa-ing appropriately, the reorganization will take place on June 5, 2015.

The Frost Small Cap Equity Fund was liquidated on December 15, 2014.

It is anticipated that the $500,000 HAGIN Keystone Market Neutral Fund (HKMNX) will liquidate on or about December 30, 2014 based on the Adviser’s “inability to market the Fund and that it does not desire to continue to support the Fund.”

Goldman Sachs World Bond Fund (GWRAX) will be liquidated on January 16, 2014. No reason was given. One wonders if word of the potential execution might have leaked out and reached the managers, say around June?

The $300 million INTECH U.S. Managed Volatility Fund II (JDRAX) is merging into the $100 million INTECH U.S. Managed Volatility Fund (JRSAX, formerly named INTECH U.S. Value Fund). Want to guess which of them had more Morningstar stars at the time of the merger? Janus will “streamline” (their word) their fund lineup on April 10, 2015.

ISI Strategy Fund (STRTX), a four star fund with $100 million in assets, will soon merge into Centre American Select Equity Fund (DHAMX). Both are oriented toward large caps and both substantially trail the S&P 500.

Market Vectors Colombia ETF, Latin America Small-Cap Index ETF, Germany Small-Cap ETF and Market Vectors Bank and Brokerage ETF disappeared, on quite short notice, just before Christmas.

New Path Tactical Allocation Fund (GTAAX), an $8 million fund which charges a 5% sales load and charges 1.64% in expenses – while investing in two ETFs at a time, though with a 600% turnover we can’t know for how long – has closed and will be vaporized on January 23, 2015.

The $2 million Perimeter Small Cap Opportunities Fund (PSCVX) will undergo “termination, liquidation and dissolution” on or about January 9, 2015.

ProShares is closing dozens of ETFs on January 9^th and liquidating them on January 22^nd. The roster includes:

SSgA IAM Shares Fund (SIAMX) has been closed in preparation for liquidation cover January 23, 2015. That’s just a mystifying decision: four-star rating, low expenses, quarter billion in assets … Odder still is the fund’s investment mandate: to invest in the equity securities of firms that have entered into collective bargaining agreements with the International Association of Machinists (that’s the “IAM” in the name) or related unions.

UBS Emerging Markets Debt Fund (EMFAX) will experience “certain actions to liquidate and dissolve the Fund” on or about February 24, 2015. The Board’s rationale was that “low asset levels and limited future prospects for growth” made the fund unviable. They were oddly silent on the question of the fund’s investment performance, which might somehow be implicated in the other two factors:

In Closing . . .

Jeez, so many interesting things are happening. There’s so much to share with you. Stuff on our to-do list:

• Active share is a powerful tool for weeding dead wood out of your portfolio. Lots and lots of fund firms have published articles extolling it. Morningstar declares you need to “get active or get out.” And yet neither Morningstar nor most of the “have our cake and eat it, too” crowd release the data. We’ll wave in the direction of the hypocrites and give you a heads up as the folks at Alpha Architect release the calculations for everyone.
• Talking about the role of independent trustees in the survival of the fund industry. We’ve just completed our analysis of the responsibilities, compensation and fund investments made by the independent trustees in 100 randomly-selected funds (excluding only muni bond funds). Frankly, our first reactions are (1) a few firms get it very right and (2) most of them have rigged the system in a way that screws themselves. You can afford to line your board with a collection of bobble-head dolls when times are good but, when times are tough, it reads like a recipe for failure.
• Not to call the ETF industry “scammy, self-congratulatory and venal” but there is some research pointing in that direction. We’re hopeful of getting you to think about it.
• Conference calls with amazing managers, maybe even tricking Andrew Foster into a reprise of his earlier visits with us.
• We’ve been talking with the folks at Third Avenue funds about the dramatic changes that this iconic firm has undergone. I think we understand them but we still need to confirm things (I hate making errors of fact) before we share. We’re hopeful that’s February.
• There are a couple new services that seem intent on challenging the way the fund industry operates. One is Motif Investing, which allows you to be your own fund manager. There are some drawbacks to the service but it would allow all of the folks who think they’re smarter than the professionals to test that hypothesis. The service that, if successful, will make a powerful social contribution is Liftoff. It’s being championed by Josh Brown, a/k/a The Reformed Broker, and the folks at Ritholtz Wealth Management. We mentioned the importance of automatic investing plans in December and Josh followed with a note about the role of Liftoff in extending such plans: “We created a solution for this segment of the public – the young, the underinvested and the people who’ve never been taught anything about how it all works. It’s called Liftoff … We custom-built portfolios that correspond to a matrix of answers the clients give us online. This helps them build a plan and automatically selects the right fund mix. The bank account link ensures continual allocation over time.” This whole “young and underinvested” thing does worry me. We’ll try to learn more.
• And we haven’t forgotten the study of mutual funds’ attempts to use YouTube to reach that same young ‘n’ muddled demographic. It’s coming!

Finally, thanks to you all. A quarter million readers came by in 2014, something on the order of 25,000 unique visitors each month.  The vast majority of you have returned month after month, which makes us a bit proud and a lot humbled.  Hundreds of you have used our Amazon link (if you haven’t bookmarked it, please do) and dozens have made direct contributions (regards especially to the good folks at Emerald Asset Management and to David Force, who are repeat offenders in the ‘help out MFO’ category, and to our ever-faithful subscribers). We’ll try to keep being worth the time you spend with us.

We’ll look for you closer to Valentine’s Day!

Dear friends,

I love language, in both its ability to clarify and to mystify.

Take the phrase “think outside the box.”  You’ve heard it more times than you’d care to count but have you ever stopped to wonder: what box are they talking about?  Maybe someone invented it for good reason, so perhaps you should avoid breaking the box?

In point of fact, it’s this box:

Here’s the challenge that lies behind the aphorism: link all nine dots using four straight lines or fewer, without lifting the pen and without tracing the same line more than once.  There are only two ways to accomplish the feat: (1) rearrange the dots, which is obviously cheating, and (2) work outside the box.  For example:

As we interviewed managers this month, Ed Studzinski, they and I got to talking about investors’ perspectives on the future.  In one camp there are the “glass half-full” guys. Dale Harvey of Poplar Forest Partners Fund (PFPFX) allowed, for example, that there may come a time to panic about the stock market, but it’s not now. He looks at three indicators and finds them all pretty green:

1. His ability to find good investment ideas.  He’s still finding opportunities to add positions to the fund.
2. What’s going on with the Fed? “Don’t fight the Fed” is an axiom for good reason, he notes.  They’ve just slowing the rate of stimulus, not slowing the economy.  You get plenty of advance notice when they really want to start applying the brakes.
3. What’s going on with investor attitudes?  Folks aren’t all whipped-up about stocks, though there are isolated “story” stocks that folks are irrational over.

Against those folks are the “glass half-empty” guys.  Some of those guys are calling the alarm; others stoically endure that leaden feeling in the pit of their stomachs that comes from knowing they’ve seen this show before and it never ends well. By way of illustration:

1. The Leuthold Group believes that large cap stocks are more than 25% overvalued, small caps much more than that, that there could be a substantial correction and that corrections overshoot, so a 40% drop is not inconceivable.
2. Jeremy Grantham of GMO places the market at 65% overvalued. Fortunately, according to a Barron’s interview, it won’t become “a true bubble” until it inflates 30% more and individual investors, still skittish, become “gung-ho.”
3. Mark Hulbert notes that “true insider” stock sales have reached their highest level in a quarter century.  Hulbert notes that insider selling isn’t usually predictive because the term “insider” encompasses both true insiders (directors, presidents, founders, operating officers) and legal insides (any investor who controls more than 5% of the stock).  It turns out that “true” insider selling is predictive of a stock market fall a couple quarters later.  He makes his argument in two similar, but not quite identical, articles in Barron’s and MarketWatch.  (Go read them.)

And me, you ask?  I guess I’m neither quite a glass half full nor a glass half empty sort of investor.  I’m closer to a “don’t drop the glass!” guy.  My non-retirement portfolio remains about where it always is (25% US stocks with a value bias, 25% international stocks with a small/emerging bias, 50% income) and it’s all funded on auto-pilot.  I didn’t lose a mint in ’08, I didn’t make a mint in ’13 and I spend more time thinking about my son’s average (the season starts in the first week of April and he’ll either be on the mound or at second) than about the Dow’s.

“Judge Our Performance Over a Full Market Cycle”

Uh huh! Be careful of what you wish for, Bub. Charles did just check your performance across full market cycles, and it’s not as pretty as you’d like. Here are his data-rich findings:

Ten Market Cycles

In response to the article In Search of Persistence, published in our January commentary, NumbersGirl posted the following on the MFO board:

I am not enamored of using rolling 3-year returns to assess persistence.

A 3-year time period will often be all up or all down. If a fund manager has an investing personality or philosophy then I would expect strong relative performance in a rising market to be negatively correlated with poor relative performance in a falling market, etc.

It seems to me that the best way to measure persistence is over 1 (or better yet more) market cycles.

There followed good discussion about pros and cons of such an assessment, including lack of consistent definition of what constitutes a market cycle.

Echoing her suggestion, fund managers also often ask to be judged “over full cycle” when comparing performance against their peers.

A quick search of literature (eg., Standard & Poor’s Surviving a Bear Market and Doug Short’s Bear Markets in the S&P since 1950) shows that bear markets are generally “defined as a drop of 20% or more from the market’s previous high.” Here’s how the folks at Steele Mutual Fund Expert define a cycle:

Full-Cycle Return: A full cycle return includes a consecutive bull and bear market return cycle.

Up-Market Return (Bull Market): A Bull market in stocks is defined as a 20% rise in the S&P 500 Index from its previous trough, ending when the index reaches its peak and subsequently declines by 20%.

Down-Market Return (Bear Market): A Bear market in stocks is defined as a 20% decline in the S&P 500 Index from its previous peak, and ends when the index reaches its trough and subsequently rises by 20%.

Applying this definition to the SP500 intraday price index indicates there have indeed been ten such cycles, including the current one still in process, since 1956:

The returns shown are based on price only, so exclude dividends. Note that the average duration seems to match-up pretty well with so-called “short term debt cycle” (aka business cycle) described by Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio in the charming How the Economic Machine Works – In 30 Minutes video.

Here’s break-out of bear and bull markets:

The graph below depicts the ten cycles. To provide some historic context, various events are time-lined – some good, but more bad. Return is on left axis, measured from start of cycle, so each builds where previous left off. Short-term interest rate is on right axis.

Note that each cycle resulted in a new all-time market high, which seems rather extraordinary. There were spectacular gains for the 1980 and 1990 bull markets, the latter being 427% trough-to-peak! (And folks worry lately that they may have missed-out on the current bull with its 177% gain.) Seeing the resiliency of the US market, it’s no wonder people like Warren Buffett advocate a buy-and-hold approach to investing, despite the painful -50% or more drawdowns, which have occurred three times over the period shown.

Having now defined the market cycles, which for this assessment applies principally to US stocks, we can revisit the question of mutual fund persistence (or lack of) across them.

Based on the same methodology used to determine MFO rankings, the chart below depicts results across nine cycles since 1962:

Blue indicates top quintile performance, while red indicates bottom quintile. The rankings are based on risk adjusted return, specifically Martin ratio, over each full cycle. Funds are compared against all other funds in the peer group. The number of funds was rather small back in 1962, but in the later cycles, these same funds are competing against literally hundreds of peers.

(Couple qualifiers: The mural does not account for survivorship-bias or style drift. Cycle performance is determined using monthly total returns, including any loads, between the peak-to-peak dates listed above, with one exception…our database starts Jan 62 and not Dec 61.)

Not unexpectedly, the result is similar to previous studies (eg., S&P Persistence Scorecard) showing persistence is elusive at best in the mutual fund business. None of the 45 original funds in four categories delivered top-peer performance across all cycles – none even came close.

Looking at the cycles from 1973, a time when several now well know funds became established, reveals a similar lack of persistence – although one or two come close to breaking the norm. Here is a look at some of the top performing names:

MFO Great Owls Mairs & Powers Balanced (MAPOX) and Vanguard Wellington (VWELX) have enjoyed superior returns the last three cycles, but not so much in the first. The reverse is true for legendary Fidelity Magellan (FMAGX).

Even a fund that comes about as close to perfection as possible, Sequoia (SEQUX), swooned in the late ‘90s relative to other growth funds, like Fidelity Contrafund (FCNTX), resulting in underperformance for the cycle. The table below details the risk and return metrics across each cycle for SEQUX, showing the -30% drawdown in early 2000, which marked the beginning of the tech bubble. In the next couple years, many other growth funds would do much worse.

So, while each cycle may rhyme, they are different, and even the best managed funds will inevitably spend some time in the barrel, if not fall from favor forever.

We will look to incorporate full-cycle performance data in the single-ticker MFO Risk Profile search tool. As suggested by NumbersGirl, it’s an important piece of due diligence and risk cognizance for all mutual fund investors.

26Mar14/Charles

Celebrating one-star funds, part 2!

Morningstar faithfully describes their iconic star ratings as a starting place for additional research, not as a one-stop judgment of a funds merit.  As a practical matter investors do use those star ratings as part of a two-step research process:

Step One: Eliminate those one- and two-star losers

Step Two: Browse the rest

In general, there are worse strategies you could follow. Nonetheless, the star ratings can seriously misrepresent the merits of individual funds.  If a fund is fundamentally misfit to its category (in March we highlighted the plight of short-term high income funds within the high-yield peer group) or if a fund is highly risk averse, there’s an unusually large chance that its star rating will conceal more than it will reveal.  After a long statistical analysis, my colleague Charles concluded in last month’s issue that:

 A consequence of Morningstar’s methodology is that low volatility funds with below average returns can quite possibly be out-ranked by average volatility funds with average returns. Put another way, the methodology generally penalizes funds with high volatility more so than it rewards funds with low volatility.

The Observer categorizes funds differently: our Great Owl funds are those whose risk-adjusted returns are in the top 20% of their peer group for every measurement period longer than one year.  Our risk-adjustment is based on a fund’s Martin ratio which “excels at identifying funds that have delivered superior returns while mitigating drawdowns.”  At base, we’ve made the judgment that investors are more sensitive to the size of a fund’s drawdown – its maximum peak to trough loss – than to the background noise of day-to-day volatility.  As a result, we reward funds that provide good returns while avoiding disastrous losses.

For those interested in a second opinion, here’s the list of all one-star Great Owl funds:

• American Century One Choice 2035 A (ARYAX)
• Aquila Three Peaks High Income A (ATPAX)
• ASTON/River Road Independent Value (ARIVX)
• BlackRock Allocation Target Shares (BRASX)
• Dividend Plus Income (MAIPX)
• Fidelity Freedom Index 2000 (FGIFX)
• Intrepid Income (ICMUX)
• Invesco Balanced-Risk Retire 2030 (TNAAX)
• Invesco Balanced-Risk Retire 2040 (TNDAX)
• Invesco Balanced-Risk Retire 2050 (TNEAX)
• PIMCO 7-15 Year U.S. Treasury Index ETF (TENZ)
• PIMCO Broad U.S. Treasury Index ETF (TRSY)
• RiverPark Short Term High Yield (RPHYX)
• Schwab Monthly Income Max Payout (SWLRX)
• SEI New Jersey Municipal Bond A (SENJX)
• SPDR Nuveen S&P VRDO Municipal Bond (VRD)
• Symons Value (SAVIX)
• Weitz Nebraska Tax-Free Income (WNTFX)
• Wells Fargo Advantage Dow Jones Target 2015 (WFQEX)
• Wells Fargo Advantage Short Term High-Yield Bond (STHBX)

Are we arguing that the Great Owl metric is intrinsically better than Morningstar’s?

Nope.  We do want to point out that every rating system contains biases, although we somehow pretend that they’re “purely objective.”  You need to understand that the fact that a fund’s biases don’t align with a rater’s preferences is not an indictment of the fund (any more than a five-star rating should be taken as an automatic endorsement of it).

Still waiting by the phone

Last month’s celebration of one-star funds took up John Rekenthaler’s challenge to propose new fund categories which were more sensible than the existing assignments and which didn’t cause “category bloat.”

Amiably enough, we suggested short-term high yield as an eminently sensible possibility.  It contains rather more than a dozen funds that act much more like aggressive short-term bond funds than like traditional high-yield bond funds, a category dominated by high-return, high-volatility funds with much longer durations.

So far, no calls of thanks and praise from the good folks in Chicago.  (sigh)

How about another try: emerging markets allocation, balanced or hybrid?  Morningstar’s own discipline is to separate pure stock funds (global or domestic) from stock-bond hybrid funds, except in the emerging markets.  Almost all of the dozen or so emerging markets hybrid funds are categorized as, and benchmarked against, pure equity funds.  Whether that advantages or disadvantages a hybrid fund at any given point isn’t the key; the question is whether it allows investors to accurately assess them.  The hybrid category is well worth a test.

Who’s watching the watchers?

Presidio Multi-Strategy Fund (PMSFX) will “discontinue operations” on April 10, 2014.  It’s a weird little fund with a portfolio about the size of my retirement account.  This isn’t the first time we’ve written about Presidio.  Presidio shared a board with Caritas All-Cap Growth (CTSAX, now Goodwood SMIDcap Discovery).   In July 2013, the Board decided to liquidate Caritas.  In August they reconsidered and turned both funds’ management over to Brenda Smith.  At that time, I expressed annoyance with their limited sense of responsibility:

The alternative? Hire Brenda A. Smith, founder of CV Investment Advisors, LLC, to manage the fund. A quick scan of SEC ADV filings shows that Ms. Smith is the principal in a two person firm with 10 or fewer clients and $5,000 in regulated AUM.

At almost the same moment, the same Board gave Ms. Smith charge of the failing Presidio Multi-Strategy Fund (PMSFX), an overpriced long/short fund that executes its strategy through ETFs.

I wish Ms. Smith and her new investors all the luck in the world, but it’s hard to see how a Board of Trustees could, with a straight face, decide to hand over one fund and resuscitate another with huge structural impediments on the promise of handing it off to a rookie manager and declare that both moves are in the best interests of long-suffering shareholders.

By October, she was gone from Caritas but she’s stayed with Presidio to the bitter end which looks something like this:

This isn’t just a note about a tiny, failed fund.  It’s a note about the Trustees of your fund boards.  Your representatives.  Your voice.  Their failures become your failures.  Their failures cause your failures.

Presidio was overseen by a rent-a-board (more politely called “a turnkey board”); a group of guys who nominally oversee dozens of unrelated funds but who have stakes in none of them.  Here’s a quick snapshot of this particular board:

The Board members are paid $2,000 per fund overseen and meet seven times a year.  The manager received rather more: “For the fiscal year ended May 31, 2013, Presidio Capital Investments, LLC received fees for its services to the Fund in the amount of $101,510,” for managing a $500,000 portfolio.

What other funds do they guide?  There are 22 of them:

• CV Asset Allocation Fund (CVASX);
• Arin Large Cap Theta Fund (AVOAX) managed by Arin Risk Advisors, LLC;
• Crescent Large Cap Macro, Mid Cap Macro and Strategic Income Funds managed by Greenwood Capital Associates, LLC;
• Horizons West Multi-Strategy Hedged Income Fund (HWCVX, formerly known as the Prophecy Alpha Trading Fund);
• Matisse Discounted Closed-End Fund Strategy (MDCAX) managed by Deschutes Portfolio Strategies;
• Roumell Opportunistic Value Fund (RAMVX) managed by Roumell Asset Management, LLC;
• The 11 RX funds (Dynamic Growth, Dynamic Total Return, Non Traditional, High Income, Traditional Equity, Traditional Fixed Income, Tactical Rotation, Tax Advantaged, Dividend Income, and Premier Managers);
• SCS Tactical Allocation Fund (SCSGX) managed by Sentinel Capital Solutions, Inc.;
• Sector Rotation Fund (NAVFX) managed by Navigator Money Management, Inc.; and
• Thornhill Strategic Equity Fund (TSEQX) managed by Thornhill Securities, Inc.

Oh, wait.  Not quite.  Crescent Mid Cap Macro (GCMIX) is “inactive.”  Thornhill Strategic Equity (TSEQX)?  No, that doesn’t seem to be trading either. Can’t find evidence that CV Asset Allocation ever launched. Right, right: the manager of Sector Rotation Fund (NAVFX) is under SEC sanction for “numerous misleading claims,” including reporting on the performance of the fund for periods in which the fund didn’t exist.

The bottom line: directors matter. Good directors can offer a manager access to skills, perspectives and networks that are far beyond his or her native abilities.  And good directors can put their collective foot down on matters of fees, bloat and lackluster performance.

Every one of your funds has a board of directors and you really need to ask just three questions about these guys:

1. What evidence is there that the directors are bringing a meaningful skill set to their post?
2. What evidence is there that the directors have executed serious oversight of the management team?
3. What evidence is there that the directors have aligned their interests with yours?

You need to look at two documents to answer those questions.  The first is the Statement of Additional Information (SAI) which is updated every time the prospectus is.  The SAI lists the board members’ qualifications, compensation, the number of funds each director oversees and the director’s investment in each of them. Here’s a general rule: if they’re overseeing dozens of funds and investing in none of them, back away.  There are some very good funds that use what I refer to as rent-a-boards as a matter of administrative convenience and financial efficiency, but the use of such boards weakens a critical safeguard.  If the board isn’t deeply invested, you need to see that the management team is.

The second document is called the Renewal of Investment Advisory Contract.  Boards are legally required to document their due diligence and to explain to you, the folks who elected them, exactly what they looked at and what they concluded.  These are sometimes freestanding documents but they’re more likely included as a section of the fund’s annual report. Look for errant nonsense, rationalizations and wishful thinking.  If you find it, run away!  Here’s an example of the discussion of fees charged by a one-star fund that trails 96-98% of its peers but charges a mint:

Fee Rate and Profitability – The Trustees considered that the Fund’s advisory fee is the highest in its peer group, while its expense ratio is the second highest. The Trustees considered [the manager’s] explanation that several funds included in the Fund’s peer group are passive index funds, which have extremely low fees because, unlike the Fund, they are not actively managed. The Trustees also considered [the] explanation that the growth strategy it uses to manage the Fund is extremely expensive and labor intensive because it involves reviewing and evaluating 8,000+ stocks four times a year.

Here’s the argument that the board bought: the fund has some of the highest fees in its industry but that’s okay because (1) you can’t expect us to be as cheap as an index fund and (2) we work hard, apparently unlike the 98% of funds that outperform us or charge less.

If you had an employee who was paid more and produced less than anyone else, what would you do?  Then ask: “and why didn’t my board do likewise?”

It’s The Money, Stupid!

By Edward Studzinski

“To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

G.K. Chesterton

There is a repetitive scene in the movie “Shakespeare in Love” – an actor and a director are reading through one of young Master Shakespeare’s newest plays, with the ink still drying.  The actor asks how a particular transition is to be made from one scene to the next.  The answer given is, “I don’t know – it’s a mystery.”  Much the same might be said for the process of setting and then regularly reviewing, mutual fund fees. One of my friends made the Long March with Morningstar’s Joe Mansueto from a cave deep in western China to what should now be known now as Morningstar Abbey in Chicago. She used to opine about how for commodity products like equity mutual funds, in a world of perfect competition if one believed economic theory as taught at the University of Chicago, it was rather odd that the clearing price for management fees, rather than continually coming down, seemed mired at one per cent. That comment was made almost twenty years ago. The fees still seem mired there.

One argument might be that you get what you pay for. Unfortunately many actively-managed equity funds that charge that approximately one per cent management fee lag their benchmarks. This presents the conundrum of how index funds charging five basis points (which Seth Klarman used to refer to as “mindless investing”) often regularly outperform the smart guys charging much more. The public airing of personality clashes at bond manager PIMCO makes for interesting reading in this area, but is not necessarily illuminating. For instance, allegedly the annual compensation for Bill Gross is $200M a year. However, much of that is arguably for his role in management at PIMCO, as co-chief investment officer. Some of it is for serving on a daily basis as the portfolio manager for however many funds his name is on as portfolio manager. Another piece of it might be tied to his ownership interest in the business.

The issue becomes even more confusing when you have similar, nay even almost identical, funds being managed by the same investment firm but coming through different channels, with different fees. The example to contrast here again is PIMCO and their funds with multiple share classes and different fees, and Harbor, a number of whose fixed income products are sub-advised by PIMCO and have lower fees for what appear, to the unvarnished eye, to be very similar products often managed by the same portfolio manager. A further variation on this theme can be seen when you have an equity manager running his own firm’s proprietary mutual fund for which he is charging ninety basis points in management fees while his firm is running a sleeve of another equity mutual fund for Vanguard, for which the firm is being paid a management fee somewhere between twenty and thirty basis points, usually with incentives tied to performance. And while the argument is often made that the funds may have different investment philosophies and strategies and a different portfolio manager, there is often a lot of overlap in the securities owned (using  the same research process and analysts).

So, let’s assume that active equity management fees are initially set by charging what everyone else is charging for similar products. One can see by looking at a prospectus, what a competitor is charging. And I can assure you that most investment managers have a pretty good idea as to who their competitors are, even if they may think they really do not have competitors. How do the fees stay at the same level, especially as, when assets under management grow there should be economies of scale?

Ah ha!  Now we reach a matter that is within the purview of the Board of Trustees for a fund or fund group. They must look at the reasonableness of the fees being charged in light of a number of variables, including investment philosophy and strategy, size of assets under management, performance, etc., etc., etc.  And perhaps a principal underpinning driving that annual review and sign-off is the peer list of funds for comparison.

Probably one of the most important assignments for a mutual fund executive, usually a chief financial officer, is (a) making sure that the right consulting firm is hired to put together the peer list of similar mutual funds and (b) confirming that the consulting firm understands their assignment. To use another movie analogy, there is a scene early on in “Animal House” where during pledge week, two of the main characters visit a fraternity house and upon entering, are immediately sent to sit on a couch off in a corner with what are clearly a small group of social outliers. Peer group identification often seems to involve finding a similar group of outliers on the equivalent of that couch.

Given the large number of funds out there, one identifies a similar universe with similar investment strategies, similar in size, but mirabile dictu, the group somehow manages to have similar or inferior performance with similar or higher fees and expenses. What to do, what to do?  Well of course, you fiddle with the break points so that above a certain size of assets under management in the fund, the fees are reduced. And you never have to deal with the issue that the real money is not in the break points but in fees that are too high to begin with. Perish the thought that one should use common sense and look at what Vanguard or Dodge and Cox are charging for base fees for similar products.

There is another lesson to be gained from the PIMCO story, and that is the issue of ownership structure. Here, you have an offshore owner like Allianz taking a hands-off attitude towards their investment in PIMCO, other than getting whatever revenue or income split it is they are getting. It would be an interesting analysis to see what the return on investment to Allianz has been for their original investment. It would also be interesting to see what the payback period was for earning back that original investment. And where lies the fiduciary obligation, especially to PIMCO clients and fund investors, in addition to Allianz shareholders?  But that is a story for another time.

How is any of this to be of use to mutual fund investors and readers of the Observer. I am showing my age, but Vice President Hubert Humphrey used to be nick-named the “Happy Warrior.” One of the things that has become clear to me recently as David and I interview managers who have set up their own firms after leaving the Dark Side, LOOK FOR THE HAPPY WARRIORS. For them, it is not the process of making money. They don’t need the money. Rather they are doing it for the love of investing.  And if nobody comes, they will still do it to manage their own money.  Avoid the ones for whom the money has become an addiction, a way of keeping score. For supplementary reading, I commend to all an article that appeared in the New York Sunday Times on January 19, 2014 entitled “For the Love of Money” by Sam Polk. As with many of my comments, I am giving all of you more work to do in the research process for managing your money. But you need to do it if you serious about investing.  And remember, character and integrity always show through.

And those who can’t teach, teach gym (part 2)

Beginning in 1997, the iconically odd-looking Jim Jubak wrote the wildly-popular “Jubak’s Picks” column for MSN Money.  In 2010, he apparently decided that investment management looked awfully easy and so launched his own fund.

Which stunk.  Over the three years of its existence, it’s trailed 99% of its peers.   And so the Board of Trustees of the Trust has approved a Plan of Liquidation which authorizes the termination, liquidation and dissolution of the Jubak Global Equity Fund (JUBAX). The Fund will be T, L, and D’d on or about May 29, 2014. (It’s my birthday!)

Here’s the picture of futility, with Mr. Jubak on the blue line and mediocrity represented by the orange one:

Yup, $16 million in assets – none of it representing capital gains.

Mr. Jubak joins a long list of pundits, seers, columnists, prognosticators and financial porn journalists who have discovered that a facility for writing about investments is an entirely separate matter from any ability to actually make money.

Among his confreres:

Robert C. Auer, founder of SBAuer Funds, LLC, was from 1996 to 2004, the lead stock market columnist for the Indianapolis Business Journal “Bulls & Bears” weekly column, authoring over 400 columns, which discussed a wide range of investment topics.  As manager of Auer Growth (AUERX), he’s turned a $10,000 investment into $8500 over the course of six years.

Jonathan Clements left a high visibility post at The Wall Street Journal to become Director of Financial Education, Citi Personal Wealth Management.  Sounds fancy.  Frankly, it looks like was relegated to “blogger.”  Mr. Clements recently announced his return to journalism, and the launch of a weekly column in the WSJ.

John Dorfman, a Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal columnist, launched Dorfman Value Fund which finally became Thunderstorm Value Fund (THUNX). Having concluded that low returns, high expenses, a one-star rating, and poor marketing aren’t the road to riches, the advisor recommended that the Board close (on January 17, 2012) and liquidate (on February 29, 2012) the fund.

Ron Insana, who left CNBC in 2006 to form a hedge fund and returned to part-time punditry three years later.  He’s currently (March 28, 2014) prognosticating “a very nasty pullback” in the stock market.

Scott Martin, a contributor to FOX Business Network and a former columnist with TheStreet.com, co-managed Astor Long/Short ETF Fund (ASTLX) for one undistinguished year before moving on.

Steven J. Milloy, “lawyer, consultant, columnist, adjunct scholar,” managed the somewhat looney Free Enterprise Action Fund which merged with the somewhat looney $12 million Congressional Effect Fund (CEFFX), which never hired Mr. Milloy and just fired Congressional Effect Management.

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.

During March, Bro. Studzinski and I contacted a quartet of distinguished managers whose careers were marked by at least two phases: successfully managing large funds within a fund complex and then walking away to launch their own independent firms.  We wanted to talk with them both about their investing disciplines and current funds and about their bigger picture view of the world of independent managers.

Our lead story in May carries the working title, “Letter to a Young Fund Manager.”  We are hoping to share some insight into what it takes to succeed as a boutique manager running your own firm.  Our hope is that the story will be as useful for folks trying to assess the role of small funds in their portfolio as it will be to the (admittedly few) folks looking to launch such funds.

As a preview, we’d like to introduce the four managers and profile their funds:

Evermore Global Value (EVGBX): David Marcus was trained by Michael Price, managed Mutual European and co-managed two other Mutual Series funds, then spent time investing in Europe before returning to launch this remarkably independent “special situations” fund.

Huber Equity Income (HULIX): Joe Huber designed and implemented a state of the art research program at Hotchkis and Wiley and managed their Value Opportunities fund for five years before striking out to launch his own firm and, coincidentally, launched two of the most successful funds in existence.

Poplar Forest Partners (PFPFX): Dale Harvey is both common and rare.  He was a very successful manager for five American Funds who was disturbed by their size.  That’s common.  So he left, which is incredibly rare.  One of the only other managers to follow that path was Howard Schow, founder of the PrimeCap funds.

Walthausen Select Value (WSVRX): John Walthausen piloted both Paradigm Value and Paradigm Select to peer-stomping returns.  He left in 2007 to create his own firm which advises two funds that have posted, well, peer stomping returns.

Launch Alert: Artisan High Income (ARTFX)

On March 19^th, Artisan launched their first fixed-income fund.  The plan is for the manager to purchase a combination of high-yield bonds and other stuff (technically: “secured and unsecured loans, including, without limitation, senior and subordinated loans, delayed funding loans and revolving credit facilities, and loan participations and assignments”). There’s careful attention given to the quality and financial strength of the bond issuer and to the magnitude of the downside risks. The fund might invest globally.

The Fund is managed by Bryan C. Krug.  For the past seven years, Mr. Krug has managed Ivy High Income (WHIAX).  His record there was distinguished, especially for his ability to maneuver through – and profit from – a variety of market conditions.  A 2013 Morningstar discussion of the fund observes, in part:

[T]he fund’s 26% allocation to bonds rated CCC and below … is well above the 15% of its typical high-yield bond peer. Recently, though, Krug has been taking a somewhat defensive stance; he increased the amount of bank loans to nearly 34% as of the end of 2012, well above the fund’s 15% target allocation … Those kinds of calls have allowed the fund to mitigate losses well–performance in 2011’s third quarter and May 2012 are ready examples–as well as to deliver strong results in a variety of other environments. That record and relatively low expenses make for a compelling case here.

$10,000 invested at the beginning of Mr. Krug’s tenure would have grown to $20,700 by the time of his departure versus $16,700 at his average peer. The Ivy fund was growing by $3 – 4 billion a year, with no evident plans for closure.  While there’s no evidence that asset bloat is what convinced Mr. Krug to look for new opportunities, indeed the fund continued to perform splendidly even at $11 billion, a number of other managers have shifted jobs for that very reason.

The minimum initial investment is $1000 for the Investor class and $250,000 for Advisor shares.  Expenses for both the Investor and Advisor classes are capped at 1.25%.

Artisan’s hiring standard has remained unchanged for decades: they interview dozens of management teams each year but hire only when they think they’ve found “category killers.” With 10 of their 12 rated funds earning four- or five-stars, they seem to achieve that goal.  Investors seeking a cautious but opportunistic take on high income investing really ought to look closer.

Funds in Registration

New mutual funds must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission before they can be offered for sale to the public. The SEC has a 75-day window during which to call for revisions of a prospectus; fund companies sometimes use that same time to tweak a fund’s fee structure or operating details.

Funds in registration this month are eligible to launch in late May or early June 2014 and some of the prospectuses do highlight that date.

This month David Welsch tracked down five funds in registration, the lowest totals since we launched three years ago.  Curious.

Manager Changes

On a related note, we also tracked down 43 sets of fund manager changes. The most intriguing of those include Amit Wadhwaney’s retirement from managing Third Avenue International Value (TAVIX) and Jim Moffett’s phased withdrawal from Scout International (UMBWX).

Updates

Our friends at RiverRoad Asset Management report that they have entered a “strategic partnership” with Affiliated Managers Group, Inc.  RiverRoad becomes AMG’s 30^th partner. The roster also includes AQR, Third Avenue and Yacktman.  As part of this agreement, AMG will purchase River Road from Aviva Investors.  Additionally, River Road’s employees will acquire a substantial portion of the equity of the business. The senior professionals at RiverRoad have signed new 10-year employment agreements.  They’re good people and we wish them well.

Even more active share.

Last month we shared a list of about 50 funds who were willing to report heir current active share, a useful measure that allows investors to see how independent their funds are of the index.  We offered folks the chance to be added to the list. A dozen joined the list, including folks from Barrow, Conestoga, Diamond Hill, DoubleLine, Evermore, LindeHanson, Pinnacle, and Poplar Forest. We’ve given our active share table a new home.

ARE YOU ACTIVE?  WOULD YOU LIKE SOMEONE TO NOTICE?

We’ve been scanning fund company sites, looking for active share reports. If we’ve missed you, we’re sorry. Help us correct the oversight  by sending us the link to where you report your active share stats. We’d be more than happy to offer a permanent home for the web’s largest open collection of active share data.

Briefly Noted . . .

For reasons unexplained, GMO has added a “purchase premium” (uhhh… sales load?) and redemption fee of between 8 and 10 basis points to three of its funds: GMO Strategic Fixed Income Fund (GMFIX), GMO Global Developed Equity Allocation Fund (GWOAX) and GMO International Developed Equity Allocation Fund (GIOTX).  Depending on the share class, the GMO funds have investment minimums in the $10 million – $300 million range.  At the lower end, that would translate to an $8,000 purchase premium.  At the high end, it might be $100,000.

Effective April 1, 2014, the principal investment strategy of the Green Century Equity Fund (GCEQX) will be revised to change the index tracked by the Fund, so as to exclude the stocks of companies that explore for, process, refine or distribute coal, oil or gas.

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

The Board of Mainstay Marketfield Fund (MFLDX) has voted to slash the management fee (slash it, I say!) by one basis point! So, in compensation for a sales load (5.75% for “A” shares), asset bloat (at $21 billion, the fund has put on nearly $17 billion since being acquired by New York Life) and sagging performance (it still leads its long/short peer group, but by a slim margin), you save $1 – every year – for every $10,000 you invest.  Yay!!!!!

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Robeco Boston Partners Long/Short Research Fund (BPRRX)  closed on a day’s notice at the end of March, 2014 because of “a concern that a significant increase in the size of the Fund may adversely affect the implementation of the Fund’s strategy.”  The advisor long-ago closed its flagship Robeco Boston Partners Long/Short Equity (BPLEX) fund.  At the beginning of January 2014 they launched a third offering, Robeco Boston Partners Global Long/Short (BGLSX) which is only available to institutional investors.

Effective as of the close of business on March 28, 2014, Perritt Ultra MicroCap Fund (PREOX) closed to new investors.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

On March 31, Alpine Innovators Fund (ADIAX) became Alpine Small Cap Fund.  It also ceased to be an all-cap growth fund oriented toward stocks benefiting from the “innovative nature of each company’s products, technology or business model.”  It was actually a pretty reasonable fund, not earth-shattering but decent.  Sadly, no one cared.  It’s not entirely clear that they’re going to swarm on yet another small-blend fund.  The upside is that the new managers have a stint with Lord Abbett Small Cap Blend Fund

Effective on or about April 28, 2014, BNY Mellon Small/Mid Cap Fund‘s (MMCIX) name will be changed to BNY Mellon Small/Mid Cap Multi-Strategy Fund and they’ll go all multi-manager on you.

Effective March 21, 2014, the ticker for the Giant 5 Total Investment System changed from FIVEX to CASHX. Cute.  The board had previously approved replacement of the phrase “Giant 5” with “Index Funds” (no, really), but that hasn’t happened yet.

At the end of April, 2014, Goldman Sachs has consented to modestly shorten the names of some of their funds.

They still don’t fit on one line.

Johnson Disciplined Mid-Cap Fund (JMDIX) is slated to become Johnson Opportunity on May 1, 2014.  At that point, it won’t be restricted to investing in mid-cap stocks anymore.  Good thing, too, since they’re only … how to say this? Intermittently excellent at that discipline.

On May 5, Laudus Mondrian Global Fixed Income Fund (LMGDX) becomes Laudus Mondrian Global Government Fixed Income Fund.  It’s already 90% in government bonds, so the change is mostly symbolic.  At the same time, Laudus Mondrian International Fixed Income Fund (LIFNX) becomes Laudus Mondrian International Government Fixed Income Fund.  It, too, invests now in government bonds.

Effective March 17, 2014, Mariner Hyman Beck Fund (MHBAX) was renamed the Mariner Managed Futures Strategy Fund.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Effective on or about May 16, 2014, AllianzGI Disciplined Equity Fund (ARDAX) and AllianzGI Dynamic Emerging Multi-Asset Fund (ADYAX) will be liquidated and dissolved. The former is tiny and mediocre, the latter tinier and worse.  Hasta!

Avatar Capital Preservation Fund (ZZZNX), Avatar Tactical Multi-Asset Income Fund (TAZNX), Avatar Absolute Return Fund (ARZNX) and Avatar Global Opportunities Fund (GOWNX) – pricey funds-of-ETFs – ceased operations on March 28, 2014.

Epiphany FFV Global Ecologic Fund (EPEAX) has closed to investors and will be liquidated on April 28, 2014.

Goldman Sachs China Equity Fund (GNIAX) is being merged “with and into” the Goldman Sachs Asia Equity Fund (GSAGX). The SEC filing mumbled indistinctly about “the second quarter of 2014” as a target date.

The $200 million Huntington Fixed Income Securities Fund (HFIIX) will be absorbed by the $5.6 billion Federated Total Return Bond Fund (TLRAX), sometime during the second quarter of 2014.  The Federated fund is pretty consistently mediocre, and still the better of the two.

On March 17, 2014, Ivy Asset Strategy New Opportunities Fund merged into Ivy Emerging Markets Equity Fund (IPOAX, formerly Ivy Pacific Opportunities Fund). On the same day, Ivy Managed European/Pacific Fund merged into Ivy Managed International Opportunities Fund (IVTAX).  (Run away!  Go buy a nice index fund!)

The $2 billion, four-star Morgan Stanley Focus Growth Fund (OMOAX) is merging with $1.3 billion, four-star Morgan Stanley Institutional Growth (MSEGX) at the beginning of April, 2014.  They are, roughly speaking, the same fund.

Parametric Currency Fund (EAPSX), $4 million in assets, volatile and unprofitable after two and a half years – closed on March 25, 2014 and was liquidated a week later.

Pax World Global Women’s Equality Fund (PXWEX) is slated to merged into a newly-formed Pax Global Women’s Index Fund.

On February 25, 2014, the Board of Trustees of Templeton Global Investment Trust on behalf of Templeton Asian Growth Fund approved a proposal to terminate and liquidate Templeton Asian Growth Fund (FASQX). The liquidation is anticipated to occur on or about May 20, 2014. I’m not sure of the story.  It’s a Mark Mobius production and he’s been running offshore versions of this fund since the early 1990s.  This creature, launched about four years ago, has been sucky performance and negligible assets.

Turner Emerging Markets Fund (TFEMX) is being liquidated on or about April 15, 2014.  Why? “This decision was made after careful consideration of the Fund’s asset size, strategic importance, current expenses and historical performance.”  Historical performance?  What historical performance?  Turner launched this fund in August of 2013.  Right.  After six months Turner pulled the plug.  Got long-term planning there, guys!

In Closing . . .

Happy anniversary to us all.  With this issue, the Observer celebrates its third anniversary.  In truth, we had no idea of what we were getting into but we knew we had a worthwhile mission and the support of good people.

We started with a fairly simple, research-based conviction: bloated funds are not good investments.  As funds swells, their investible universes contract, their internal incentives switch from investment excellence to avoiding headline risk, and their reward systems shift to reward asset growth and retention.  They become timid, sclerotic and unrewarding.

To be clear, we know of no reason which supports the proposition that bigger is better, most especially in the case of funds that place some or all of their portfolios in stocks.  And yet the industry is organized, almost exclusively, to facilitate such beasts.  Independent managers find it hard to get attention, are disadvantaged when it comes to distribution networks, and have almost no chance of receiving analyst coverage.

We’ve tried to be a voice for the little guy.  We’ve tried to speak clearly and honestly about the silly things that you’re tempted into doing and the opportunities that you’re likely overlooking.  So far we’ve reached over 300,000 readers who’ve dropped by for well over a million visits.  Which is pretty good for a site with neither commercial endorsements or pictures of celebrities in their swimwear.

In the year ahead, we’ll try to do better.  We’re taking seriously our readers’ recommendation.  One recommendation was to increase the number of fund profiles (done!) and to spend more time revisiting some of the funds we’ve previously written about (done!).  As we reviewed your responses to “what one change could we make to better serve you” question, several answers occurred over and over:

1. People would like more help in assembling portfolios, perhaps in form of model portfolios or portfolio templates.  A major goal for 2014, then, is working more with our friends in the industry to identify useful strategies for allowing folks to identify their own risk/return preferences and matching those to compatible funds.  We need to be careful since we’re not trained as financial advisors, so we want to offer models and illustrations rather than pretend to individual advice.
2. People would like more guidance on the resources already on-site.  We’ve done a poor job in accommodating the fact that we see about 10,000 first-time visitors each month.  As a result, people aren’t aware that we do maintain an archive of every audio-recording of our conference calls (check the Funds tab, then Featured Funds), and do have lists of recommended books (Resources -> Books!) and news sources (Best of the Web).  And so one of our goals for the year ahead is to make the Observer more transparent and more easily navigable.
3. Many people have asked about mid-month updates, at least in the case of closures or other developments which come with clear deadlines.  We might well be able to arrange to send a simple email, rarely more than once a month, if something compelling breaks.
4. Finally, many people asked for guidance for new investors.

Those are all wonderfully sensible suggestions and we take them very seriously.  Our immediate task is to begin inventorying our resources and capabilities; we need to ask “what’s the best we can do with what we’ve got today?” And “how can we work to strengthen our organizational foundation, so that we can help more?”

Those are great questions and we very much hope you join us as we shape the answers in the year ahead.

Finally, I’ll note that I’m shamefully far behind in extending thanks to the folks who’ve contributed to the Observer – by check or PayPal – in the past month.  I’ve launched on a new (and terrifying) adventure in home ownership; I spent much of the past month looking at houses in Davenport with the hopes of having a place by May 1.  I’m about 250 sets of signatures and initials into the process, with just one or two additional pallets of scary-looking forms to go!  Pray for me.

And thanks to you all.

Dear friends,

Given the intensity of the headlines, you’d think that Black Monday had revisited us weekly or, perhaps, that Smaug had settled his scaly bulk firmly atop our portfolios.  But no, the market wandered down a few percent for the month.  I have the same reaction to the near-hysterical headlines about the emerging markets (“rout,” “panic” and “sell-off” are popular headline terms). From the headlines, you’d think the emerging markets had lost a quarter of their value and that their governments were back to defaulting on debts and privatizing companies. They haven’t and they aren’t.  It makes you wonder how ready we are for the inevitable sharp correction that many are predicting and few are expecting.

Where are the customers’ yachts: The power of asking the wrong question

In 1940, Fred Schwed penned one of the most caustic and widely-read finance books of its time.  Where Are the Customers’ Yachts, now in its sixth edition, opens with an anecdote reportedly set in 1900 and popular on Wall Street in the 1920s.

That’s an almost irresistibly attractive tale since it so quickly captures the essence of what we all suspect: finance is a game rigged to benefit the financiers, a sort of reverse Robin Hood scheme in which we eagerly participate. Disclosure of rampant manipulation of the London currency exchanges is just the most recent round in the game.

As charming as it is, it’s also fundamentally the wrong question.  Why?  Because “buying a yacht” was not the goal for the vast majority of those customers.  Presumably their goals were things like “buying a house” or “having a rainy day cushion,” which means the right question would have been “where are the customer’s houses?”

We commit the same fallacy today when we ask, “can your fund beat the market?”  It’s the question that drives hundreds of articles about the failure of active management and of financial advisors more generally.  But it’s the wrong question.  Our financial goals aren’t expressed relative to the market; they’re expressed in terms of life goals and objectives to which our investments might contribute.

In short, the right question is “why does investing in this fund give me a better chance of achieving my goals than I would have otherwise?”  That might redirect our attention to questions far more important than whether Fund X lags or leads the S&P500 by 50 bps a year.  Those fractions of a percent are not driving your investment performance nearly as much as other ill-considered decisions are.  The impulse to jump in and out of emerging markets funds (or bond funds or U.S. small caps) based on wildly overheated headlines are far more destructive than any other factor.

Morningstar calculates “investor returns” for hundreds of funds. Investor returns are an attempt to answer the question, “did the investors show up after the party was over and leave as things got dicey?”  That is, did investors buy into something they didn’t understand and weren’t prepared to stick with? The gap between what an investor could have made – the fund’s long-term returns – and what the average investor actually seems to have made – the investor returns – can be appalling.  T. Rowe Price Emerging Market Stock (PRMSX) made 9% over the past decade, its average investor made 4%. Over a 15 year horizon the disparity is worse: the fund earned 10.7% while investors were around for 4.3% gains.  The gap for Dodge & Cox Stock (DODGX) is smaller but palpable: 9.2% for the fund over 15 years but 7.0% for its well-heeled investors. 

My colleague Charles has urged me to submit a manuscript on mutual fund investing to John Wiley’s Little Book series, along with such classics as The Little Book That Makes You Rich and The Little Book That Beats the Market. I might. But if I do, it will be The Little Book That Doesn’t Beat the Market: And Why That’s Just Fine. Its core message will be this:

If you spend less time researching your investments than you spend researching a new kitchen blender, you’re screwed.  If you base your investments on a belief in magical outcomes, you’re screwed.  And if you think that 9% returns will flow to you with the smooth, stately grace of a Rolls Royce on a country road, you’re screwed.

But if you take the time to understand yourself and you take the time to understand the strategies that will be used by the people you’re hiring to provide for your future, you’ve got a chance.

And a good, actively managed mutual fund can make a difference but only if you look for the things that make a difference.  I’ll suggest four:

Understanding: do you know what your manager plans to do?  Here’s a test: you can explain it to your utterly uninterested spouse and then have him or her correctly explain it back?  Does your manager write in a way that draws you closer to understanding, or are you seeing impenetrable prose or marketing babble?  When you have a question, can you call or write and actually receive an intelligible answer?

Alignment: is your manager’s personal best interests directly tied to your success?  Has he limited himself to his best ideas, or does he own a bit of everything, everywhere?  Has he committed his own personal fortune to the fund?  Have his Board of Directors?  Is he capable of telling you the limits of his strategy; that is, how much money he can handle without diluting performance? And is he committed to closing the fund long before you reach that sad point?

Independence: does your fund have a reason to exist? Is there any reason to believe that you couldn’t substitute any one of a hundred other strategies and get the same results? Does your fund publish its active share; that is, the amount of difference between it and an index? Does it publish its r-squared value; that is, the degree to which it merely imitates the performance of its peer group? 

Volatility: does your manager admit to how bad it could get? Not just the fund’s standard deviation, which is a pretty dilute measure of risk. No, do they provide their maximum drawdown for you; that is, the worst hit they ever took from peak to trough.  Are the willing to share and explain their Sharpe and Sortino ratios, key measures of whether you’re getting reasonably compensated for the hits you’ll inevitable take?  Are they willing to talk with you in sharply rising markets about how to prepare for the sharply falling ones?

The research is clear: there are structural and psychological factors that make a difference in your prospects for success.  Neither breathless headlines nor raw performance numbers are among them.

Then again, there’s a real question of whether it could ever compete for total sales with my first book, Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the Moral Majority (total 20-year sales: 650 copies).

Absolute value’s sudden charm

Jeremy Grantham often speaks of “career risk” as one of the great impediments to investment success. The fact that managers know they’re apt to be fired for doing the right thing at the wrong time is a powerful deterrent to them. For a great many, “the right thing” is refusing to buy overvalued stocks. Nonetheless, when confronted by a sharply rising market and investor ebullience, most conclude that it’s “the wrong time” to act on principle. In short, they buy when they know  they probably shouldn’t.

A handful of brave souls have refused to succumb to the pressure. In general, they’re described as “absolute value” investors. That is, they’ll only buy stocks that are selling at a substantial discount to their underlying value; the mere fact that they’re “the best of a bad lot” isn’t enough to tempt them.

And, in general, they got killed – at least in relative terms – in 2013. We thought it would be interesting to look at the flip side, the performance of those same funds during January 2014 when the equity indexes dropped 3.5 – 4%.  While the period is too brief to offer any major insights, it gives you a sense of how dramatically fortunes can reverse.

THE ABSOLUTE VALUE GUYS

Motion, not progress

Cynic, n.  A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

                                                                                                         Ambrose Bierce

One of the joys of having entered the investment business in the 1980’s is that you came in at a time when the profession was still populated by some really nice and thoughtful people, well-read and curious about the world around them.  They were and are generally willing to share their thoughts and ideas without hesitation. They were the kind of people that you hoped you could keep as friends for life.  One such person is my friend, Bruce, who had a thirty-year career on the “buy side” as both an analyst and a director of research at several well-known money management firms. He retired in 2008 and divides his time between homes in western Connecticut and Costa Rica.

Here in Chicago in January, with snow falling again and the wind chill taking the temperature below zero, I see that Bruce, sitting now in Costa Rica, is the smart one.  Then I reflected on a lunch we had on a warm summer day last August near the Mohawk Trail in western Massachusetts.  We stay in touch regularly but this was the first time the two of us had gotten together in several years. 

The first thing I asked Bruce was what he missed most about no longer being active in the business.  Without hesitation he said that it was the people. For most of his career he had interacted daily with other smart investors as well as company management teams.  You learned how they thought, what kind of people they were, whether they loved their businesses or were just doing it to make money, and how they treated their shareholders and investors. Some of his best memories were of one-on-one meetings or small group dinners.  These were events that companies used to hold for their institutional shareholders.  That ended with the implementation of Regulation FD (full disclosure), the purpose of which was to eliminate the so-called whisper number that used to be “leaked” to certain brokerage firm analysts ahead of earnings reporting dates. This would allow those analysts to tip-off favored clients, giving them an edge in buying or selling a position. Companies now deal with this issue by keeping tight control on investor meetings and what can be said in them, tending to favor multi-media analyst days (timed, choreographed, scripted, and rehearsed events where you find yourself one of three hundred in a room being spoon-fed drivel), and earnings conference calls (timed, choreographed, scripted, and rehearsed events where you find yourself one of a faceless mass listening to reporting without seeing any body language).  Companies will still visit current and potential investors by means of “road shows” run by a friendly brokerage firm coincidentally looking for investment banking business.  But the exchange of information can be less than free-flowing, especially if the brokerage analyst sits in on the meeting.  And, to prevent accidental disclosure, the event is still heavily scripted.  It has however created a new sideline business for brokerage firms in these days of declining commission rates.  Even if you are a large existing institutional shareholder, the broker/investment bankers think you should pay them $10,000 – $15,000 in commissions for the privilege of seeing the management of a company you already own.  This is apparently illegal in the United Kingdom, and referred to as “pay to play” there.  Here, neither the SEC nor the compliance officers have tumbled to it as an apparent fiduciary violation.

Next I asked him what had been most frustrating in his final years. Again without hesitation he said that it was difficult to feel that you were actually able to add value in evaluating large cap companies, given how the regulatory environment had changed. I mentioned to him that everyone seemed to be trying to replace the on-site leg work part of fundamental analysis with screening and extensive earnings modeling, going out multiple years. Unfortunately many of those using such approaches appear to have not learned the law of significant numbers in high school chemistry. They seek exactitude while in reality adding complexity.  At the same time, the subjective value of sitting in a company headquarters waiting room and seeing how customers, visitors, and employees are treated is no longer appreciated.

Bruce, like many value investors, favors private market value as the best underpinning for security valuation. That is, based on recent transactions to acquire a comparable business, what was this one worth? But you need an active merger & acquisition market for the valuation not to be tied to stale inputs. He mentioned that he had observed the increased use of dividend discount models to complement other valuation work. However, he thought that there was a danger in a low interest-rate environment that a dividend discount model could produce absurd results. One analyst had brought him a valuation write-up supported by a dividend discount model. Most of the business value ended up being in the terminal segment, requiring a 15 or 16X EBITDA multiple to make the numbers work.  Who in the real world pays that for a business?  I mentioned that Luther King, a distinguished investment manager in Texas with an excellent long-term record, insisted on meeting as many company managements as he could, even in his seventies, as part of his firm’s ongoing due diligence. He did not want his investors to think that their investments were being followed and analyzed by “three guys and a Bloomberg terminal.”  And in reality, one cannot learn an industry and company solely through a Bloomberg terminal, webcasts, and conference calls. 

Bruce then mentioned another potentially corrupting factor. His experience was that investment firms compensate analysts based on idea generation, performance of the idea, and the investment dollars committed to the idea. This can lead to gamesmanship as you get to the end of the measurement period for compensation. E.g., we tell corporate managements they shouldn’t act as if they were winding up and liquidating their business at the end of a quarter or year. Yet, we incent analysts to act that way (and lock in a profitable bonus) by recommending sale of an idea much too early. Or at the other extreme, they may not want to recommend sale of the idea when they should. I mentioned that one solution was to eliminate such compensation performance assessments as one large West Coast firm is reputed to have done after the disastrous 2008 meltdown. They were trying to restore a culture that for eighty years had been geared to producing the best long-term compounding investment ideas for the clients. However, they also had the luxury of being independent.      

Finally I asked Bruce what tipped him over the edge into retirement. He said he got tired of discussions about “scalability.” A brief explanation is in order. After the dot-com disaster at the beginning of the decade, followed by the debacle years of 2008-2009, many investment firms put into place an implicit policy. For an idea to be added to the investment universe, a full investment position had to be capable of being acquired in five days average trading volume for that issue. Likewise, one had to also be able to exit the position in five days average trading volume. If it could not pass those hurdles, it was not a suitable investment. This cuts out small cap and most mid-cap ideas, as well as a number of large cap ideas where there is limited investment float. While the benchmark universe might be the S&P 500, in actuality it ends up being something very different. Rather than investing in the best ideas for clients, one ends up investing in the best liquid ideas for clients (I will save for another day the discussion about illiquid investments consistently producing higher returns long-term, albeit with greater volatility). 

From Bruce’s perspective, too much money is chasing too few good ideas. This has resulted in what we call “style drift”.  Firms that had made their mark as small cap or mid cap investors didn’t want to kill the goose laying the golden eggs by shutting off new money, so they evolved to become large cap investors. But ultimately that is self-defeating, for as the assets come in, you either have to shut down the flows or change your style by adding more and larger positions, which ultimately leads to under-performance.

I mentioned to Bruce that the other problem of too much money chasing too few good new ideas was that it tended to encourage “smart guy investing,” a term coined by a mutual friend of ours in Chicago. The perfect example of this was Dell. When it first appeared in the portfolios of Southeastern Asset Management, I was surprised. Over the next year, the idea made its way in to many more portfolios at other firms. Why? Because originally Southeastern had made it a very large position, which indicated they were convinced of its investment merits. The outsider take was “they are smart guys – they must have done the work.” And so, at the end of the day after making their own assessments, a number of other smart guys followed. In retrospect it appears that the really smart guy was Michael Dell.

A month ago I was reading a summary of the 2013 annual investment retreat of a family office investment firm with an excellent reputation located in Vermont. A conclusion reached was that the incremental value being provided by many large cap active managers was not justified by the fees being charged. Therefore, they determined that that part of an asset allocation mix should make use of low cost index funds. That is a growing trend. Something else that I think is happening now in the industry is that investment firms that are not independent are increasingly being run for short-term profitability as the competition and fee pressures from products like exchange traded funds increases. Mike Royko, the Chicago newspaper columnist once said that the unofficial motto of Chicago is “Ubi est meum?” or “Where’s mine?” Segments of the investment management business seemed to have adopted it as well. As a long-term value investor in New York recently said to me, short-termism is now the thing. 

The ultimate lesson is the basic David Snowball raison d’etre for the Mutual Fund Observer. Find yourself funds that are relatively small and independent, with a clearly articulated philosophy and strategy. Look to see, by reading the reports and looking at the lists of holdings, that they are actually doing what they say they are doing, and that their interests are aligned with yours. Look at their active share, the extent to which the holdings do not mimic their benchmark index. And if you cannot be bothered to do the work, put your investments in low cost index vehicles and focus on asset allocation.  Otherwise, as Mr. Buffet once said, if you are seated at the table to play cards and don’t identify the “mark” you should leave, as you are it.

Edward Studzinski    

Impact of Category on Fund Ratings

The results for MFO’s fund ratings through quarter ending December 2013, which include the latest Great Owl and Three Alarm funds, can be found on the Search Tools page. The ratings are across 92 fund categories, defined by Morningstar, and include three newly created categories:

Corporate Bond. “The corporate bond category was created to cull funds from the intermediate-term and long-term bond categories that focused on corporate bonds,” reports Cara Esser.  Examples are Vanguard Interm-Term Invmt-Grade Inv (VFICX) and T. Rowe Price Corporate Income (PRPIX).

Preferred Stock. “The preferred stock category includes funds with a majority of assets invested in preferred stock over a three-year period. Previously, most preferred share funds were lumped in with long-term bond funds because of their historically high sensitivity to long-term yields.” An example is iShares US Preferred Stock (PFF).

Tactical Allocation. “Tactical Allocation portfolios seek to provide capital appreciation and income by actively shifting allocations between asset classes. These portfolios have material shifts across equity regions and bond sectors on a frequent basis.” Examples here are PIMCO All Asset All Authority Inst (PAUIX) and AQR Risk Parity (AQRIX).

An “all cap” or “all style” category is still not included in the category definitions, as explained by John Rekenthaler in Why Morningstar Lacks an All-Cap Fund Category. The omission frustrates many, including BobC, a seasoned contributor to the MFO board:

Osterweis (OSTFX) is a mid-cap blend fund, according to M*. But don’t say that to John Osterweis. Even looking at the style map, you can see the fund covers all of the style boxes, and it has about 20% in foreign stocks, with 8% in emerging countries. John would tell you that he has never managed the fund to a style box. In truth he is style box agnostic. He is looking for great companies to buy at a discount. Yet M* compares the fund with others that are VERY different.

In fairness, according to the methodology, “for multiple-share-class funds, each share class is rated separately and counted as a fraction of a fund within this scale, which may cause slight variations in the distribution percentages.” Truth is, fund managers or certainly their marketing departments are sensitive to what category their fund lands-in, as it can impact relative ratings for return, risk, and price.

As reported in David’s October commentary, we learned that Whitebox Funds appealed to the Morningstar editorial board to have its Tactical Opportunities Fund (WBMIX) changed from aggressive allocation to long/short equity. WBMIX certainly has the latitude to practice long/short; in fact, the strategy is helping the fund better negotiate the market’s rough start in 2014. But its ratings are higher and price is lower, relatively, in the new category.

One hotly debated fund on the MFO board, ASTON/River Road Independent Small Value (ARIVX), managed by Eric Cinnamond, would also benefit from a category change. As a small cap, the fund rates a 1 (bottom quintile) for 2013 in the MFO ratings system, but when viewed as a conservative or tactical allocation fund – because of significant shifts to cash – the ratings improve. Here is impact on return group rank for a couple alternative categories:

Of course, a conservative tactical allocation category would be a perfect antidote here (just kidding).

Getting It Wrong. David has commented more than once about the “wildly inappropriate” mis-categorization of Riverpark Short Term High Yield Fund (RPHIX), managed by David Sherman, which debuted with just a single star after its first three years of operation. The MFO community considers the closed fund more of a cash alternative, suited best to the short- or even ultrashort-term bond categories, but Morningstar placed it in the high yield bond category.

Exacerbating the issue is that the star system appears to rank returns after deducting for a so-called “risk penalty,” based on the variation in month-to-month return during the rating period. This is good. But it also means that funds like RPHIX, which have lower absolute returns with little or no downside, do not get credit for their very high risk-adjusted return ratios, like Sharpe, Sortino, or Martin.

Below is the impact of categorization, as well as return metrics, on its performance ranking. The sweet irony is that its absolute return even beat the US bond aggregate index!

RPHIX is a top tier fund by just about any measure when placed in a more appropriate bond category or when examined with risk-adjusted return ratios. (Even Modigliani’s M2, a genuinely risk-adjusted return, not a ratio, that is often used to compare portfolios with different levels of risk, reinforces that RPHIX should still be top tier even in the high yield bond category.) Since Morningstar states its categorizations are “based strictly on portfolio statistics,” and not fund names, hopefully the editorial board will have opportunity to make things right for this fund at the bi-annual review in May.

A Broader View. Interestingly, prior to July 2002, Morningstar rated funds using just four broad asset-class-based groups: US stock, international stock, taxable bond, and municipal bonds. It switched to (smaller) categories to neutralize market tends or “tailwinds,” which would cause, for example, persistent outperformance by funds with value strategies.

A consequence of rating funds within smaller categories, however, is more attention goes to more funds, including higher risk funds, even if they have underperformed the broader market on a risk-adjusted basis. And in other cases, the system calls less attention to funds that have outperformed the broader market, but lost an occasional joust in their peer group, resulting in a lower rating.

Running the MFO ratings using only the four board legacy categories reveals just how much categorization can alter the ratings. For example, the resulting “US stock” 20-year Great Owl funds are dominated by allocation funds, along with a high number of sector equity funds, particularly health. But rate the same funds with the current categories (Great Owl Funds – 4Q2013), and we find more funds across the 3 x 3 style box, plus some higher risk sector funds, but the absence of health funds.

Fortunately, some funds are such strong performers that they appear to transcend categorization. The eighteen funds listed below have consistently delivered high excess return while avoiding large drawdown and end-up in the top return quintile over the past 20, 10, 5, and 3 year evaluation periods using either categorization approach:

 Roy Weitz grouped funds into only five equity and six specialty “benchmark categories” when he established the legacy Three Alarm Funds list. Similarly, when Accipiter created the MFO Miraculous Multi-Search tool, he organized the 92 categories used in the MFO rating system into 11 groups…not too many, not too few. Running the ratings for these groupings provides some satisfying results:

A more radical approach may be to replace traditional style categories altogether! For example, instead of looking for best performing small-cap value funds, one would look for the best performing funds based on a risk level consistent with an investor’s temperament. Implementing this approach, using Risk Group (as defined in ratings system) for category, identifies the following 20-year Great Owls:

Bottom Line. Category placement can be as important to a fund’s commercial success as its people, process, performance, price and parent. Many more categories exist today on which peer groups are established and ratings performed, causing us to pay more attention to more funds. And perhaps that is the point. Like all chambers of commerce, Morningstar is as much a promoter of the fund industry, as it is a provider of helpful information to investors. No one envies the enormous task of defining, maintaining, and defending the rationale for several dozen and ever-evolving fund categories. Investors should be wary, however, that the proliferation may provide a better view of the grove than the forest.

28Jan2014/Charles

Our readers speak!

And we’re grateful for it. Last month we gave folks an opportunity to weigh-in on their assessment of how we’re doing and what we should do differently. Nearly 350 of you shared your reactions during the first week of the New Year. That represents a tiny fraction of the 27,000 unique readers who came by in January, so we’re not going to put as much weight on the statistical results as on the thoughts you shared.

We thought we’d share what we heard. This month we’ll highlight the statistical results.  In March we’ll share some of your written comments (they run over 30 pages) and our understanding of them.

Who are you?

80% identified themselves as private investors, 18% worked in the financial services industry and 2% were journalists, bloggers and analysts.

How often do you read the Observer?

The most common answer is “I just drop by at the start of the month” (36%). That combines with “I drop by once every month, but not necessarily at the start”) (14%) to explain about half of the results. At the same time, a quarter of you visit four or more times every month. (And thanks for it!)

Which features are most (or least) interesting to you?

By far, the greatest number of “great, do more!” responses came under “individual fund profiles.” A very distant second and third were the longer pieces in the monthly commentary (such as Motion, Not Progress and Impact of Category on Fund Ratings) and the shorter pieces (on fund liquidations and such) in the commentary. Folks had the least interest in our conference calls and funds in registration.

Hmmm … we’re entirely sympathetic to the desire for more fund profiles. Morningstar has an effective monopoly in the area and their institutional biases are clear: of the last 100 fund analyses posted, only 13 featured funds with under one billion in assets. Only one fund launched since January 2010 was profiled. In response, we’re going to try to increase the number of profiles each month to at least four with a goal of hitting five or six. 

We’re not terribly concerned about the tepid response to the conference calls since they’re useful in writing our profiles and the audience for them continues to grow. If you haven’t tried one, perhaps it might be worthwhile this month?

And so, in response to your suggestion, here’s the freshly expanded …

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. 

ASTON/River Road Long Short (ARLSX): measured in the cold light of risk-return statistics, ARLSX is as good as it gets. We’d recommend that interested parties look at both this profile and at the conference call highlights, below.

Artisan Global Small Cap (ARTWX): what part of “phenomenally talented, enormously experienced management team now offers access to a poorly-explored asset class” isn’t interesting to you?

Grandeur Peak Emerging Opportunities (GPEOX): ditto!

RiverNorth Equity Opportunity (RNEOX): ditto! Equity Opportunity is a redesigned and greatly strengthened version of an earlier fund.  This new edition is all RiverNorth and that is, for folks looking for buffered equity exposure, a really interesting option.

We try to think strategically about which funds to profile. Part of the strategy is to highlight funds that might do you well in the immediate market environment, as well as others that are likely to be distinctly out of step with today’s market but very strong additions in the long-run. We reached out in January to the managers of two funds in the latter category: the newly-launched Meridian Small Cap Growth (MSGAX) and William Blair Emerging Markets Small Cap (WESNX). Neither has responded to a request for information (we were curious about strategy capacity, for instance, and risk-management protocols). We’ll continue reaching out; if we don’t hear back, we’ll profile the funds in March with a small caution flag attached.

RiverNorth conference call, February 25 2014

RiverNorth’s opportunistic CEF strategy strikes us as distinctive, profitable and very crafty. We’ve tried to explain it in profiles of RNCOX and RNEOX. Investors who are intrigued by the opportunity to invest with RiverNorth should sign up for their upcoming webcast entitled RiverNorth Closed-End Fund Strategies: Capitalizing on Discount Volatility. While this is not an Observer event, we’ve spoken with Mr. Galley a lot and are impressed with his insights and his ability to help folks make sense of what the strategy can and cannot do.

Navigate over to http://www.rivernorthfunds.com/events/ for free registration.

Conference Call Highlights:  ASTON River Road Long/Short (ARLSX)

We spoke with Daniel Johnson and Matt Moran, managers for the River Road Long-Short Equity strategy which is incorporated in Aston River Road Long-Short Fund (ARLSX). Mike Mayhew, one of the Partners at Aston Asset, was also in on the call to answer questions about the fund’s mechanics. About 60 people joined in.

The highlights, for me, were:

the fund’s strategy is sensible and straightforward, which means there aren’t a lot of moving parts and there’s not a lot of conceptual complexity. The fund’s stock market exposure can run from 10 – 90% long, with an average in the 50-70% range. The guys measure their portfolio’s discount to fair value; if their favorite stocks sell at a less than 80% of fair value, they increase exposure. The long portfolio is compact (15-30), driven by an absolute value discipline, and emphasizes high quality firms that they can hold for the long term. The short portfolio (20-40 names) is stocked with poorly managed firms with a combination of a bad business model and a dying industry whose stock is overpriced and does not show positive price momentum. That is, they “get out of the way of moving trains” and won’t short stocks that show positive price movements.

the fund grew from $8M to $207M in a year, with a strategy capacity in the $1B – 1.5B range. They anticipate substantial additional growth, which should lower expenses a little (and might improve tax efficiency – my note, not theirs). Because they started the year with such a small asset base, the expense numbers are exaggerated; expenses might have been 5% of assets back when they were tiny, but that’s no longer the case. 

shorting expenses were boosted by the vogue for dividend-paying stocks, which  drove valuations of some otherwise sucky stocks sharply higher; that increases the fund’s expenses because they’ve got to repay those dividends but the managers believe that the shorts will turn out to be profitable even so.

the guys have no client other than the fund, don’t expect ever to have one, hope to manage the fund until they retire and they have 100% of their liquid net worth in it.

their target is “sleep-at-night equity exposure,” which translates to a maximum drawdown (their worst-case market event) of no more than 10-15%. They’ve been particularly appalled by long/short funds that suffered drawdowns in the 20-25% range which is, they say, not consistent with why folks buy such funds.

they’ve got the highest Sharpe ratio of any long-short fund, their longs beat the market by 900 bps, their shorts beat the inverse of the market by 1100 bps and they’ve kept volatility to about 40% of the market’s while capturing 70% of its total returns.

A lot of the Q&A focused on the fund’s short portfolio and a little on the current state of the market. The guys note that they tend to generate ideas (they keep a watchlist of no more than 40 names) by paging through Value Line. They focus on fundamentals (let’s call it “reality”) rather than just valuation numbers in assembling their portfolio. They point out that sometimes fundamentally rotten firms manage to make their numbers (e.g., dividend yield or cash flow) look good but, at the same time, the reality is that it’s a poorly managed firm in a failing industry. On the flip side, sometimes firms in special situations (spinoffs or those emerging from bankruptcy) will have little analyst coverage and odd numbers but still be fundamentally great bargains. The fact that they need to find two or three new ideas, rather than thirty or sixty, allows them to look more carefully and think more broadly. That turns out to be profitable.

Bottom Line: this is not an all-offense all the time fund, a stance paradoxically taken by some of its long-short peers.  Neither is it a timid little “let’s short an ETF or two and hope” offering.”  It has a clear value discipline and even clearer risk controls.  For a conservative equity investor like me, that’s been a compelling combination.

Folks unable to make the call but interested in it can download or listen to the .mp3 of the call, which will open in a separate window.

As with all of these funds, we have a featured funds page for ARLSX which provides a permanent home for the mp3 and highlights, and pulls together all of the best resources we have for the fund.

Would An Additional Heads Up Help?

Over 220 readers have signed up for a conference call mailing list. About a week ahead of each call, I write to everyone on the list to remind them of what might make the call special and how to register. If you’d like to be added to the conference call list, just drop me a line.

Conference Call Upcoming:  Joshua B. Parker and Alan Salzbank, RiverPark / Gargoyle Hedged Value

Josh Parker and Alan Salzbank, Co-Portfolio Managers of the RiverPark/Gargoyle Hedged Value Fund (RGHVX) and Morty Schaja, RiverPark’s CEO; are pleased to join us for a conference call scheduled for Wednesday, February 12 from 7:00 – 8:00 PM Eastern. We profiled the fund in June 2013, but haven’t spoken with the managers before.  

Why speak with them now?  Three reasons.  First, you really need to have a strategy in place for hedging the substantial gains booked by the stock market since its March 2009 low. There are three broad strategies for doing that: an absolute value strategy which will hold cash rather than overpriced equities, a long-short equity strategy and an options-based strategy. Since you’ve had a chance to hear from folks representing the first two, it seems wise to give you access to the third. Second, RiverPark has gotten it consistently right when it comes to both managers and strategies. I respect their ability and their record in bringing interesting strategies to “the mass affluent” (and me). Finally, RiverPark/Gargoyle Hedged Value Fund ranks as a top performing fund within the Morningstar Long/Short category since its inception 14 years ago. The Fund underwent a conversion from its former partnership hedge fund structure in April 2012 and is managed using the same approach by the same investment team, but now offers daily liquidity, low  minimums and a substantially lower fee structure for shareholders.

I asked Alan what he’d like folks to know ahead of the call. Here’s what he shared:

Alan and Josh have spent the last twenty-five years as traders and managers of options-based investment strategies beginning their careers as market makers on the option floor in the 1980’s. The Gargoyle strategy involves using a disciplined quantitative approach to find and purchase what they believe to be undervalued stocks. They have a unique approach to managing volatility through the sale of relatively overpriced index call options to hedge the portfolio. Their strategy is similar to traditional buy/write option strategies that offer reduced volatility and some downside protection, but gains an advantage by selling index rather single stock options. This allows them to benefit from both the systemic overpricing of index options while not sacrificing the alpha they hope to realize on their bottom-up stock picking, 

The Fund targets a 50% net market exposure and manages the option portfolio such that market exposure stays within the range of 35% to 65%. Notably, using this conservative approach, the Fund has still managed to outperform the S&P 500 over the last five years. Josh and Alan believe that over the long term shareholders can continue to realize returns greater than the market with less risk. Gargoyle’s website features an eight minute video “The Options Advantage” describing the investment process and the key differences between their strategy and a typical single stock buy-write (click here to watch video).

That call is scheduled for Wednesday, February 12, from 7:00 – 8:00 Eastern. We’ll provide additional details in our February issue.  

HOW CAN YOU JOIN IN?

If you’d like to join in, just click on register and you’ll be taken to the Chorus Call site. In exchange for your name and email, you’ll receive a toll-free number, a PIN and instructions on joining the call. If you register, I’ll send you a reminder email on the morning of the call.

Funds in Registration

New mutual funds must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission before they can be offered for sale to the public. The SEC has a 75-day window during which to call for revisions of a prospectus; fund companies sometimes use that same time to tweak a fund’s fee structure or operating details.

Funds in registration this month are eligible to launch in late March or early April 2014, and some of the prospectuses do highlight that date.

This month David Welsch celebrated a newly-earned degree from SUNY-Sullivan and still tracked down 18 no-load retail funds in registration, which represents our core interest.

Four sets of filings caught our attention. First, DoubleLine is launching two new and slightly edgy funds (the “wherever I want to go” Flexible Income Fund managed by Mr. Gundlach and an emerging markets short-term bond fund). Second, three focused value funds from Pzena, a well-respected institutional manager. Third, Scout Equity Opportunity Fund which will be managed by Brent Olson, a former Aquila Three Peaks Opportunity Growth Fund (ATGAX) manager. While I can’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship, ATGAX vastly underperformed its mid-cap growth peers for the decade prior to Mr. Olson’s arrival and substantially outperformed them during his tenure. 

Finally, Victory Emerging Markets Small Cap Fund will join the small pool of EM small cap funds. I’d normally be a bit less interested, but their EM small cap separate accounts have substantially outperformed their benchmark with relatively low volatility over the past five years. The initial expense ratio will be 1.50% and the minimum initial investment is $2500, reduced to $1000 for IRAs.

Manager Changes

On a related note, we also tracked down 39 sets of fund manager changes. The most intriguing of those include what appears to be the surprising outflow of managers from T. Rowe Price, Alpine’s decision to replace its lead managers with an outsider and entirely rechristen one of their funds, and Bill McVail’s departure after 15 years at Turner Small Cap Growth.

Updates

We noted a couple months ago that DundeeWealth was looking to exit the U.S. fund market and sell their funds. Through legal maneuvers too complicated for me to follow, the very solid Dynamic U.S. Growth Fund (Class II, DWUHX) has undergone the necessary reorganization and will continue to function as Dynamic U.S. Growth Fund with Noah Blackstein, its founding manager, still at the helm. 

Briefly Noted . . .

Effective March 31 2014, Alpine Innovators Fund (ADIAX) transforms into Alpine Small Cap Fund.  Following the move, it will be repositioned as a domestic small cap core fund, with up to 30% international.  Both of Innovator’s managers, the Liebers, are being replaced by Michael T. Smith, long-time manager of Lord Abbett Small-Cap Blend Fund (LSBAX).  Smith’s fund had a very weak record over its last five years and was merged out of existence in July, 2013; Smith left Lord Abbett in February of that year.

Effective April 1, 2014, the principal investment strategy of the Green Century Equity Fund (GCEQX) will be revised to change the index tracked by the Fund, so as to exclude the stocks of companies that explore for, process, refine or distribute coal, oil or gas. 

The Oppenheimer Steelpath funds have decided to resort to English. It’s kinda refreshing. The funds’ current investment Objectives read like this:

The investment objective of Oppenheimer SteelPath MLP Alpha Fund (the “Fund” or “Alpha Fund”) is to provide investors with a concentrated portfolio of energy infrastructure Master Limited Partnerships (“MLPs”) which the Advisor believes will provide substantial long-term capital appreciation through distribution growth and an attractive level of current income.

As of February 28, it becomes:

The Fund seeks total return.

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

The Board of Trustees of the Fund has approved an increase in the Congressional Effect Fund’s (CEFFX) expense cap from 1.50% to 3.00%. Since I think their core strategy – “go to cash whenever Congress is in session” – is not sensible, a suspicion supported by their 0.95% annual returns over the past five years, becoming less attractive to investors is probably a net good.

Driehaus Mutual Funds’ Board approved reductions in the management fees for the Driehaus International Discovery Fund (DRIDX) and the Driehaus Global Growth Fund (DRGGX) which became effective January 1, 2014.  At base, it’s a 10-15 bps drop. 

Effective February 3, 2014, Virtus Emerging Markets Opportunities Fund (HEMZX) will be open to new investors. Low risk, above average returns but over $7 billion in the portfolio. Technically that’s capped at “two cheers.”

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Effective February 14, 2014, American Beacon Stephens Small Cap Growth Fund (STSGX) will act to limit inflows by stopping new retirement and benefit plans from opening accounts with the fund.

Artisan Global Value Fund (ARTGX) will soft-close on February 14, 2014.  Its managers were just recognized as Morningstar’s international-stock fund managers of the year for 2013. We’ve written about the fund four times since 2008, each time ending with the same note: “there are few better offerings in the global fund realm.”

As of the close of business on January 28, 2014, the GL Macro Performance Fund (GLMPX) will close to new investments. They don’t say that the fund is going to disappear, but that’s the clear implication of closing an underperforming, $5 million fund even to folks with automatic investment plans.

Effective January 31, the Wasatch International Growth Fund (WAIGX) closed to new investors.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

Effective February 1, 2014, the name of the CMG Tactical Equity Strategy Fund (SCOTX) will be changed to CMG Tactical Futures Strategy Fund.

Effective March 3, 2014, the name of the Mariner Hyman Beck Portfolio (MHBAX) has been changed to Mariner Managed Futures Strategy Portfolio.

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

On January 24, 2014, the Board of Trustees approved the closing and subsequent liquidation of the Fusion Fund (AFFSX, AFFAX).

ING will ask shareholders in June 2014 to approve the merger of five externally sub-advised funds into three ING funds.   

The Board of Trustees of iShares voted to close and liquidate ten international sector ETFs, effective March 26, 2014.  The decedents are:  

• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Consumer Discretionary ETF (AXDI)
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Consumer Staples ETF (AXSL)
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Energy ETF (AXEN)
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Financials ETF (AXFN)
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Healthcare ETF (AXHE)
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Industrials ETF (AXID)
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Information Technology ETF (AXIT)
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Materials ETF (AXMT)
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Telecommunication Services ETF (AXTE) and
• iShares MSCI ACWI ex U.S. Utilities ETF (AXUT)

The Nomura Funds board has authorized the liquidation of their three funds:

• Nomura Asia Pacific ex Japan Fund (NPAAX)
• Nomura Global Emerging Markets Fund (NPEAX)
• Nomura Global Equity Income Fund (NPWAX)

The liquidations will occur on or about March 19, 2014.

On January 30, 2014, the shareholders of the Quaker Akros Absolute Return Fund (AARFX) approved the liquidation of the Fund which has banked five-year returns of (0.13%) annually. 

The Vanguard Growth Equity Fund (VGEQX)is to be reorganized into the Vanguard U.S. Growth Fund (VWUSX) on or about February 21, 2014. The Trustees helpfully note: “The reorganization does not require shareholder approval, and you are not being asked to vote.”

Virtus Greater Asia ex Japan Opportunities Fund (VGAAX) is closing on February 21, 2014, and will be liquidated shortly thereafter.  Old story: decent but not stellar returns, no assets.

In Closing . . .

Thanks a hundred times over for your continued support of the Observer, whether through direct contributions or using our Amazon link.  I’m a little concerned about Amazon’s squishy financial results and the risk that they’re going to go looking for ways to pinch pennies. Your continued use of that program provides us with about 80% of our monthly revenue.  Thanks, especially, to the folks at Evergreen Asset Management and Gardey Financial Advisors, who have been very generous over the years; while the money means a lot, the knowledge that we’re actually making a difference for folks means even more.

The next month will see our migration to a new, more reliable server, a long talk with the folks at Gargoyle and profiles of four intriguing small funds.  Since you make it all possible, I hope you join us for it all.

As ever,

Dear friends,

Welcome to the New Year.  At least as we calculate it.  The Year of the Horse begins January 31, a date the Vietnamese share.  The Iranians, like the ancient Romans, sensibly celebrate the New Year at the beginning of spring.  A bunch of cultures in South Asia pick mid-April. Rosh Hashanah (“head of the year”) rolls around in September.  My Celtic ancestors (and a bunch of modern Druidic wannabees) preferred Samhain, at the start of November.

Whatever your culture, the New Year is bittersweet.  We seem obsessed with looking back in regret at all the stuff we didn’t do, as much as we look forward to all of the stuff we might yet do.

My suggestion: can the regrets, get off yer butt, and do the stuff now that you know you need to do.  One small start: get rid of that mutual fund.  You know the one.  You’ve been regretting it for years.  You keep thinking “maybe I’ll wait to let it come back a bit.”  The one that you tend to forget to mention whenever you talk about investments.

Good gravy.  Dump it!  It takes about 30 seconds on the phone and no one is going to hassle you about it; it’s not like the manager is going to grab the line and begin pleading for a bit more time.  Pick up a lower cost replacement.  Maybe look into a nice ETF or index fund. Track down a really good fund whose manager is willing to put his own fortune and honor at risk along with yours.

You’ll feel a lot better once you do.

We can talk about your gym membership later.

Voices from the bottom of the well

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Thos. Paine, The Crisis, 23 December 1776

Investors highly value managers who are principled, decisive, independent, active and contrarian.  Right up to the moment that they have one. 

Then they’re appalled.

There are two honorable approaches to investing: relative value and absolute value.  Relative value investors tend to buy the best-priced securities available, even if the price quoted isn’t very good.  They tend to remain fully invested even when the market is pricey and have, as their mantra, “there’s always a bull market in something.”  They’re optimistic by nature, enjoy fruity wines and rarely wear bowties.

Absolute value investors tend to buy equities only when they’re selling for cheap.  Schooled in the works of Graham and Dodd, they’re adamant about having “a margin of safety” when investing in an inherently risk asset class like stocks.  They tend to calculate the fair value of a company and they tend to use cautious assumptions in making those calculations.  They tend to look for investments selling at a 30% discount to fair value, or to firms likely to produce 10% internal returns of return even if things turn ugly.  They’re often found sniffing around the piles that trendier investors have fled.  And when they find no compelling values, they raise cash.  Sometimes lots of cash, sometimes for quite a while.  Their mantra is, “it’s not ‘different this time’.”  They’re slightly-mournful by nature, contemplate Scotch, and rather enjoyed Andy Rooney’s commentaries on “60 Minutes.”

If you’re looking for a shortcut to finding absolute value investors today, it’s a safe bet you’ll find them atop the “%age portfolio cash” list.  And at the bottom of the “YTD relative return” list.  They are, in short, the guys you’re now railing against.

But should you be?

I spent a chunk of December talking with guys who’ve managed five-star funds and who were loved by the crowds but who are now suspected of having doubled-up on their intake of Stupid Pills.  They are, on whole, stoic. 

Take-aways from those conversations:

1. They hate cash.  As a matter of fact, it’s second on their most-hated list behind only “risking permanent impairment of capital”.
2. They’re not perma-bears. They love owning stocks. These are, by and large, guys who sat around reading The Intelligent Investor during recess and get tingly at the thought of visiting Omaha. But they love them for the prospect of the substantial, compounded returns they might generate.  The price of those outsized returns, though, is waiting for one of the market’s periodic mad sales.
3. They bought stocks like mad in early 2009, around the time that the rest of us were becoming nauseated at the thought of opening our 401(k) statements. Richard Cook and Dowe Bynum, for example, were at 2% cash in March 2009.  Eric Cinnamond was, likewise, fully invested then.
4. They’ve been through this before though, as Mr. Cinnamond notes, “it isn’t very fun.”  The market moves in multi-year cycles, generally five years long more or less. While each cycle is different in composition, they all have similar features: the macro environment turns accommodative, stocks rise, the fearful finally rush in, stocks overshoot fair value by a lot, there’s an “oops” and a mass exit for the door.  Typically, the folks who arrived late inherit the bulk of the pain.
5. And they know you’re disgusted with them. Mr. Cinnamond, whose fund has compounded at 12% annually for the past 15 years, allows “we get those long-term returns by looking very stupid.”  Richard Cook agrees, “we’re going to look silly, sometimes for three to five years at a stretch.”  Zac Wydra admits that he sometimes looks at himself in the mirror and asks “how can you be so stupid?”

And to those investors who declare, “but the market is reasonably priced,” they reply: “we don’t buy ‘the market.’  We buy stocks.  Find the individual stocks that meet the criteria that you hired us to apply, and we’ll buy them.”

What do they think you should do now?  In general, be patient.  Mr. Cook points to Charlie Munger’s observation:

I think the [Berkshire Hathaway’s] record shows the advantage of a peculiar mind-set – not seeking action for its own sake, but instead combining extreme patience with extreme decisiveness. It takes character to sit there with all that cash and do nothing. I didn’t get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.

Which is hard.  Several of the guys pointed to Seth Klarman’s decision to return $4 billion in capital to his hedge fund investors this month. Klarman made the decision in principle back in September, arguing that if there were no compelling investment opportunities, he’d start mailing out checks.  Two things are worth noting about Klarman: (1) his hedge funds have posted returns in the high teens for over 30 years and (2) he’s willing to sit at 33-50% cash for a long time if that’s what it takes to generate big long-term returns.

Few managers have Klarman’s record or ability to wait out markets.  Mr. Cinnamond noted, “there aren’t many fund managers with a long track record doing this because you’re so apt to get fired.”  Jeremy Grantham of GMO nods, declaring that “career risk” is often a greater driver of a manager’s decisions than market risk is.

In general, the absolute value guys suggest you think differently about their funds than you think about fully-invested relative value ones.  Cook and Bynum’s institutional partners think of them as “alternative asset managers,” rather than equity guys and they regard value-leaning hedge funds as their natural peer group.  John Deysher, manager of Pinnacle Value (PVFIX), recommends considering “cash-adjusted returns” as a viable measure, though Mr. Cinnamond disagrees since a manager investing in unpopular, undervalued sectors in a momentum driven market is still going to look inept.

Our bottom line: investors need to take a lot more responsibility if they’re going to thrive.  That means we’ve got to look beyond simple return numbers and ask, instead, about what decisions led to those returns.  That means actually reading your managers’ commentaries, contacting the fund reps with specific questions (if your questions are thoughtful rather more than knee-jerk, you’d be surprised at the quality of answers you receive) and asking the all-important question, “is my manager doing precisely what I hired him to do: to be stubbornly independent, fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful?” 

Alternately: buy a suite of broadly diversified, low-cost index funds.  There are several really solid funds-of-index-funds that give you broad exposure to market risk with no exposure to manager risk.  The only thing that you need to avoid at all costs is the herd: do not pay active management prices for the services of managers whose only goal is to be no different than every other timid soul out there.

The Absolute Value Guys

* FPACX’s “moderate allocation” competitors were caught holding bonds this year, dumber even than holding cash.

Don’t worry, relative value guys.  Morningstar’s got your back.

Earnings at S&P500 companies grew by 11% in 2013, through late December, and they paid out a couple percent in dividends.  Arguably, then, stocks are worth about 13% more than they were in January.  Unfortunately, the prices paid for those stocks rose by more than twice that amount.  Stocks rose by 32.4% in 2013, with the Dow setting 50 all-time record highs in the process. One might imagine that if prices started at around fair value and then rose 2.5 times as much as earnings did, valuations would be getting stretched.  Perhaps overvalued by 19% (simple subtraction of the earnings + dividend rise from the price + dividend rise)?

Not to worry, Morningstar’s got you covered.  By their estimation, valuations are up only 5% on the year – from fully valued in January to 5% high at year’s end.  They concluded that it’s certainly not time to reconsider your mad rush into US equities.  (Our outlook for the stock market, 12/27/2013.) While the author, Matthew Coffina, did approvingly quote Warren Buffett on market timing:

Charlie and I believe it’s a terrible mistake to try to dance in and out of it based upon the turn of tarot cards, the predictions of “experts,” or the ebb and flow of business activity. The risks of being out of the game are huge compared to the risks of being in it.

He didn’t, however, invoke what Warren Buffett terms “the three most important words in all of investing,” margin of safety.  Because you can’t be sure of a firm’s exact value, you always need to pay less than you think it’s worth – ideally 30 or 40% less – in order to protect your investors against your own fallible judgment. 

Quo Vadis Japan

I go out of the darkness

Onto a road of darkness

Lit only by the far off

Moon on the edge of the mountains.

Izumi

One of the benefits of having had multiple careers and a plethora of interests is that friends and associates always stand ready with suggestions for you to occupy your time. In January of 2012, a former colleague and good friend from my days with the Navy’s long-range strategic planning group suggested that I might find it interesting to attend the Second China Defense and Security Conference at the Jamestown Foundation. That is how I found myself seated in a conference room in February with roughly a hundred other people. My fellow attendees were primarily from the various alphabet soup governmental agencies and mid-level military officers. 

The morning’s presentations might best be summed up as grudging praise about the transformation of the Chinese military, especially their navy, from a regional force to one increasingly able to project power throughout Asia and beyond to carry out China’s national interests. When I finally could not stand it any longer, after a presentation during Q&A, I stuck my hand up and asked why there was absolutely no mention of the 600 pound gorilla in the corner of the room, namely Japan and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. The JMSDF was and is either the second or third largest navy in the world. It is considered by many professional observers to be extraordinarily capable. The silence that greeted my question was akin to what one would observe if I had brought in a dog that had peed on the floor. The moderator muttered a few comments about the JMSDF having fine capabilities. We then went on with no mention of Japan again. At that point I realized I had just learned the most important thing that I was going to take from the conference, that Japan (and its military) had become the invisible country of Asia. 

The New Year is when as an investor you reflect back on successes and mistakes. And if one is especially introspective, one can ponder why. For most of 2013, I was banging the drum on two investment themes that made sense to me:  (a) the Japanese equity market and (b) the Japanese currency – the yen – hedged back into U.S. dollars. The broad Japanese market touched highs this month not seen before this century. The dollar – yen exchange rate moved from 89.5 at the beginning of the year to 105.5. In tandem, the themes have proven to be quite profitable. Had an investment been made solely in the Wisdom Tree: Japan Hedged Equity ETF, a total return of 41.8% would have been achieved by the U.S. dollar investor. So, is this another false start for both the Japanese stock market and economy? Or is Japan on the cusp of an economic and political transformation?   

When I mention to institutional investors that I think the change in Japan is real, the most common response I get is a concern about “Abenomics.” This is usually expressed as “They are printing an awful lot of money.”  Give me a break.  Ben Bernanke and his little band of merry Fed governors have effectively been printing money with their various QE efforts. Who thinks that money will be repaid or the devaluation of the U.S. dollar will be reversed?  The same can be said of the EU central bankers.  If anything, the U.S. has been pursuing a policy of beggar thy creditor, since much of our debt is owed to others.  At least in Japan, they owe the money to themselves. They have also gone through years of deflation without the social order and fabric of society breaking down. One wonders how the U.S. would fare in a similar long-term deflationary environment. 

I think the more important distinction is to emphasize what “Abenomics” is not.  It is not a one-off program of purchasing government bonds with a view towards going from a multi-year deflationary spiral to generating a few points of inflation.  It is a comprehensive program aimed at reversing Japan’s economic, political, and strategic slide of the past twenty years. Subsumed under the rubric of “Abenomics” are efforts to increase and widen the acceptance of child care facilities to enable more of Japan’s female talent pool to actively participate in the workforce, a shift in policy for the investments permitted in pension funds to dramatically increase domestic equity exposure, and incentives to transform the Japanese universities into research and resource engines. Similarly, the Japanese economy is beginning to open from a closed economy to one of free trade, especially in agriculture, as Japan has joined the Trans Pacific Partnership. Finally, public opinion has shifted dramatically to a willingness to contemplate revision of Japan’s American-drafted post-war Constitution. This would permit a standing military and a more active military posture. It would normalize Japan as a global nation, and restore a balance of interests and power in East Asia. The ultimate goal then is to restore the self-confidence of the Japanese nation.  So, what awakened Japan and the Japanese?

Strangely enough, the Chinese did it. I have been in Japan four times in the last twenty-two months, which does not make me an expert on anything. But it has allowed me to discern a shift in the mood of the country. Long-time Japan hands had told me that when public opinion in Japan shifts, it shifts all at once and moves together in the same direction. Several months ago, I asked a friend and investment manager who is a long-time resident of Tokyo what had caused that shift in opinion. His response was that most individuals, he as well, traced it to the arrest and detention by the Japanese Coast Guard, of a Chinese fishing vessel and its captain who had strayed into Japanese waters. China responded aggressively, embargoing rare earth materials that the Japanese electronics and automobile industries needed, and made other public bellicose noises. Riots and torching of Japanese plants in China followed, with what seemed to be the tacit approval of the Chinese government. Japan released the ship and its captain, and in Asian parlance, lost face. As my friend explained it, the Japanese public came to the conclusion that the Chinese government was composed of bad people whose behavior was unacceptable. Concurrently, Japan Inc. began to relocate its overseas investment away from China and into countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore.

From an investment point of view, what does it all mean? First, one should not look at Prime Minister Abe, Act II (remember that he was briefly in office for 12 months in 2006-2007) in a vacuum. Like Reagan and Churchill, he used his time in the “wilderness years” to rethink what he wanted to achieve for Japan and how he would set about doing it. Second, one of the things one learns about Japan and the Japanese is that they believe in their country and generally trust their government, and are prepared to invest in Japan. This is in stark contrast to China, where if the rumors of capital flows are to be believed, vast sums of money are flowing out of the country through Hong Kong and Singapore. So, after the above events involving China, Abe’s timing in return to office was timely. 

While Japanese equities have surged this year, that surge has been primarily in the large cap liquid issues that are easily studied and invested in by global firms. Most U.S. firms follow the fly-by approach. Go to Tokyo for a week of company meetings, and invest accordingly. Few firms make the commitment of having resources on the ground. That is why if you look at most U.S.-based Japan specialist mutual funds, they all own pretty much the same large cap liquid names, with only the percentages and sector weightings varying. There are tiers of small and mid-cap companies that are under-researched and under-invested in.  If this is the beginning of a secular bull market, as we saw start in the U.S. in 1982, Japan will just be at the beginnings of eliminating the value gap between intrinsic value and the market price of securities, especially in the more inefficiently-traded and under-researched companies. 

So, as Lenin once famously asked, “What is to be done?”  For most individuals, individual stock investments are out of the question, given the currency, custody, language, trading, and tax issues. For exposure to the asset class, there is a lot to be said for a passive approach through an index fund or exchange-traded fund, of which there are a number with relatively low expense ratios. Finally, there are the fifteen or so Japan-only mutual funds. I am only aware of three that are small-cap vehicles – DFA, Fidelity, and Hennessy. There are also two actively-managed closed end funds. I will look to others to put together performance numbers and information that will allow you to research the area and draw your own conclusions.  

Finally, it should be obvious that Japan does not lend itself to simple explanations. As Americans, we are often in a time-warp, thinking that with the atomic bombs, American Occupation and force-fed Constitution, we successfully transformed Japan into a pacifist democratically-styled Asian theme park.  My conclusion is rather that what you see in Japan is not reality (whatever that is) but what they are comfortable with you seeing. I think for instance of the cultural differences with China in a business sense.  With the Chinese businessman, a signed contract is in effect the beginning of the negotiation.  For the Japanese businessman, a signed contract is a commitment to be honored to the letter.

I will leave you with one thing to ponder shared with me by a Japanese friend. She told me that the samurai have been gone for a long time in Japan. But, everyone in Japan still knows who the samurai families are and everyone knows who is of those families and who is not. And she said, everyone from those families still tends to marry into other samurai families.  So I thought, perhaps they are not gone after all.  

Edward Studzinski

From Day One …

… the Observer’s readers were anxious to have us publish lists of Great Funds, as FundAlarm did with its Honor Roll funds.  For a long time I demurred because I was afraid folks would take such a list too seriously.  That is, rather than viewing it as a collection of historical observations, they’d see it as a shopping list. 

After two years and unrelenting inquires, I prevailed upon my colleague Charles to look at whether we could produce a list of funds that had great track records but, at the same time, highlight the often-hidden data concerning those funds’ risks.  With that request and Charles’s initiative, the Great Owl Funds were launched.

And now Charles returns to that troubling original question: what can we actually learn about the future from a fund’s past?

In Search of Persistence

It outperformed nearly 3/4ths of the time, while it under-performed only 5%. NAINX essentially equaled or beat its peers 194 out of 205 periods. Encouraged, the investor purchases the fund making a long-term commitment to buy-and-hold.

It’s now 2013, twenty years later. How has NAINX performed? To the investor’s horror, Virtus Tactical Allocation underperformed 3/4ths of the time since purchased! And the fund that outperformed most persistently? Mairs & Power Balanced (MAPOX), of course.

Back to 1993. This time a more aggressive investor applies the same methodology to the large growth category and finds an extraordinary fund, named Fidelity Magellan (FMAGX).  This fund outperformed nearly 100% of the time across 205 rolling 3-year periods over 20 years versus 31 other long-time peers. But during the next 20 years…? Not well, unfortunately. This investor would have done better choosing Fidelity Contrafund (FCNTX). How can this be? Most industry experts would attribute the colossal shift in FMAGX performance to the resignation of legendary fund manager Peter Lynch in 1990.

MJG, one of the heavy contributors to MFO’s discussion board, posts regularly about the difficulty of staying on top of one’s peer group, often citing results from Standard & Poor’s Index Versus Active Indexing (SPIVA) reports. Here is the top lesson-learned from ten years of these reports:

“Over a five-year horizon…a majority of active funds in most categories fail to outperform indexes. If an investing horizon is five years or longer, a passive approach may be preferable.”

The December 2013 SPIVA “Persistence Scorecard” has just been published, which Joshua Brown writes insightfully about in “Persistence is a Killer.” The scorecard once again shows that only a small fraction of top performing domestic equity mutual funds remain on top across any 2, 3, or 5 year period.

What does mutual fund non-persistence look like across 40 years? Here’s one depiction:

The image (or “mural”) represents monthly rank by color-coded quintiles of risk-adjusted returns, specifically Martin Ratio, for 101 funds across five categories. The funds have existed for 40 years through September 2013. The calculations use total monthly returns of oldest share class only, ignoring any load, survivor bias, and category drift.  Within each category, the funds are listed alphabetically.

There are no long blue/green horizontal streaks. If anything, there seem to be more extended orange/red streaks, suggesting that if mutual fund persistence does exist, it’s in the wrong quintiles! (SPIVA actually finds similar result and such bottom funds tend to end-up merged or liquated.)

Looking across the 40 years of 3-year rolling risk-adjusted returns, some observations:

• 98% of funds spent some periods in every rank level…top, bottom, and all in-between
• 35% landed in the bottom two quintiles most of the time…that’s more than 1/3^rd of all funds
• 13% were in the top two bottom quintiles…apparently harder to be persistently good than bad
• Sequoia (SEQUX) was the most persistent top performer…one of greatest mutual funds ever
• Wall Street (WALLX) was the most persistent cellar dweller…how can it still exist?

The difference in overall return between the most persistent winner and loser is breathtaking: SEQUX delivered 5.5 times more than SP500 and 16 times more than WALLX. Put another way, $10K invested in SEQUX in October 1973 is worth nearly $3M today. Here’s how the comparison looks:

So, while attaining persistence may be elusive, the motivation to achieve it is clear and present.

The implication of a lack of persistence strikes at the core of all fund rating methodologies that investors try to use to predict future returns, at least those based only on historical returns. It is, of course, why Kiplinger, Money, and Morningstar all try to incorporate additional factors, like shareholder friendliness, experience, and strategy, when compiling their Best Funds lists. An attempt, as Morningstar well states, to identify “funds with the highest potential of success.”

The MFO rating system was introduced in June 2013. The current 20-year Great Owls, shown below for moderate allocation and large growth categories, include funds that have achieved top performance rank over the past 20, 10, 5, and 3 year evaluation periods. (See Rating Definitions.)

But will they be Great Owls next year? The system is strictly quantitative based on past returns, which means, alas, a gentle and all too ubiquitous reminder that past performance is not a guarantee of future results. (More qualitative assessments of fund strategy, stewardship, and promise are provided monthly in David’s fund profiles.) In any case and in the spirit of SPIVA, we will plan to publish periodically a Great Owl “Persistence Scorecard.”

31Dec2013/Charles

It’s not exciting just because the marketers say it is

Most mutual funds don’t really have any investment reason to exist: they’re mostly asset gathering tools that some advisor created in support of its business model. Even the funds that do have a compelling case to make often have trouble receiving a fair hearing, so I’m sympathetic to the need to find new angles and new pitches to try to get journalists’ and investors’ attention.

But the fact that a marketer announces it doesn’t mean that journalists need to validate it through repetition. And it doesn’t mean that you should just take in what we’ve written.

Case in point: BlackRock Emerging Markets Long/Short Fund (BLSAX).  Here’s the combination of reasonable and silly statements offered in a BlackRock article justifying long/short investing:

For example, our access to information relies on cutting edge infrastructure to compile vast amounts of obvious and less-obvious sources of publicly available information. In fact, we consume a massive amount of data from more than 25 countries, with a storage capacity 4 times the Library of Congress and 8 times the size of Wikipedia. We take that vast quantity of publicly available information and filter and identify relevant pieces.

Reasonable statement: we do lots of research.  Silly statement: we have a really big hard drive on our computer (“a storage capacity of…”).  Why on earth would we care?  And what on earth does it mean?  “4 times the Library of Congress”?  The LoC digital collection – a small fraction of its total collection – holds three petabytes of data, a statement that folks immediately recognize as nonsensical.  3,000,000 gigabytes.  So the BlackRock team has a 12 petabyte hard drive?  12 petabytes of data?  How’s it used?  How much is reliable, consistent, contradictory or outdated?  How much value do you get from data so vast that you’ll never comprehend it?

NSA’s biggest “data farm” consumes 65 megawatts of power, has melted down 10 times, and – by the fed’s own reckoning – still hasn’t produced demonstrable security gains.  Data ≠ knowledge.

The Google, by the way, processes 20 petabytes of user-generated content per day.

Nonetheless, Investment News promptly and uncritically gloms onto the factoid, and then gets it twice wrong:

The Scientific Active Equity team takes quantitative investing to a whole new level. In fact, the team has amassed so much data on publicly traded companies that its database is now four times the size of Wikipedia and eight times the size of the Library of Congress (Jason Kephart, Beyond black box investing: Fund uses database four times the size of Wikipedia, 12/26/13).

Error 1: reversing the LoC and the Wikipedia.  Error 2: conflating “storage capacity” with “data.” (And, of course, confusing “pile o’ data” with “something meaningful.”)

MFWire promptly grabs the bullhorn to share the errors and the credulity:

This Fund Uses the Data of Eight Libraries of Congress (12/26/13, Boxing Day for our British friends)

The team managing the fund uses gigantic amounts of data — four times the size of Wikipedia and eight times the size of the Library of Congress — on public company earnings, analyst calls, news releases, what have you, to gain on insights into different stocks, according to Kephart.

Our second, perhaps larger, point of disagreement with Jason (who, in fairness, generally does exceptionally solid work) comes in his enthusiasm for one particular statistic:

That brings us to perhaps the fund’s most impressive stat, and the one advisers really need to keep their eyes on: its correlation to global equities.

Based on weekly returns through the third quarter, the most recent data available, the fund has a correlation of just 0.38 to the MSCI World Index and a correlation of 0.36 to the S&P 500. Correlations lower than 0.5 lead to better diversification and can lead to better risk-adjusted returns for the entire portfolio.

Uhhh.  No?

Why, exactly, is correlation The Golden Number?  And why is BlackRock’s correlation enough to make you tingle?  The BlackRock fund has been around just one year, so we don’t know its long-term correlation.  In December, it had a net market exposure of just 9% which actually makes a .36 correlation seem oddly high. BlackRock’s correlation is not distinctively low (Whitebox Long/Short WBLSX has a three-year correlation of 0.33, for instance). 

Nor is low correlation the hallmark of the best long-term funds in the group.  By almost any measure, the best long/short fund in existence is the closed Robeco Boston Partners L/S Equity Fund (BPLEX).  BPLEX is a five-star fund, a Lipper Leader, a Great Owl fund, with returns in the top 4% of its peer group over the past decade. And its long term correlation to the market: 75.  Wasatch Long/Short (FMLSX), another great fund with a long track record: 90. Marketfield (MFLDX), four-star, Great Owl: 67.

The case for BlackRock EM L/S is it’s open. It’s got a good record, though a short one.  In comparison to other, more-established funds, it substantially trails Long-Short Opportunity (LSOFX) since inception, is comparable to ASTON River Road (ARLSX) and Wasatch Long Short (FMLSX), while it leads Whitebox Long-Short (WBLSX), Robeco Boston Partners (BPLEX) and RiverPark Long/Short Opportunity (RLSFX). The fund has nearly $400 million in assets after one year and charges 2% expenses plus a 5.25% front load.  That’s more than ARLSX, WBLSX or FMLSX, though cheaper than LSOFX. 

Bottom Line: as writers, we need to guard against the pressures created by deadlines and the desire for “clicks.”  As readers, you need to realize we have good days and bad and you need to keep asking the questions we should be asking: what’s the context of this number?  What does it mean?  Why am I being given it? How does it compare?  And, as investors, we all need to remember that magic is more common in the world of Harry Potter than in the world we’re stuck with.

Wells Fargo and the Roll Call of the Wretched

Our Annual Roll Call of the Wretched highlights those funds which consistently, over a period of many years, trail their benchmark.  We noted that inclusion on the list signaled one of two problems:

• Bad fund or
• Bad benchmark.

The former problem is obvious.  The latter takes a word of explanation.  There are 7055 distinct mutual funds, each claiming – more or less legitimately – to be different from all of the others.   For the purpose of comparison, Morningstar and Lipper assign them to one of 108 categories.  Some funds fit easily and well, others are laughably misfit.  One example is RiverPark Short-Term High Yield Fund (RPHYX), which is a splendid cash management fund whose performance is being compared to the High-Yield group which is dominated by longer-duration bonds that carry equity-like risks and returns.

You get a sense of the mismatch – and of the reason that RPHYX was assigned one-star – when you compare the movements of the fund to the high-yield group.

That same problem afflicts Wells Fargo Advantage Short-Term High Yield Bond (SSTHX), an entirely admirable fund that returns around 4% per year over the long term in a category that delivers 50% greater returns with 150% greater volatility.  In Morningstar’s eyes, one star.

Joel Talish, one of the managing directors at Wells Fargo Advisors, raised the entirely reasonable objection that SSTHX isn’t wretched – it’s misclassified – and it shouldn’t be in the Roll Call at all. He might well be right. Our strategy has been to report all of the funds that pass the statistical screen, then to highlight those whose performance is better than the peer data suggest.  We don’t tend to remove funds from the list just because we believe that the ratings agencies are wrong. We’ve made that decision consciously: investors need to read these ubiquitous statistical screens more closely and more skeptically.  A pattern of results arises from a series of actions, and they’re meaningful only if you take the time to understand what’s going on. By highlighting solid funds that look bad because of a rater’s unexplained assignments, we’re trying to help folks learn how to look past the stars.

It might well be the case that highlighting and explaining SSTHX’s consistently one-star performance did a substantial disservice to the management team. It was a judgment call on our part and we’ll revisit it as we prepare future features.  For now, we’re hopeful that the point we highlighted at the start of the list: 

Use lists like the Roll Call of the Wretched or the Three Alarm Funds as a first step, not a final answer.  If you see a fund of yours on either list, find out why.  Call the adviser, read the prospectus, try the manager’s letter, post a question on our board.  There might be a perfectly good reason for their performance, there might be a perfectly awful one.  In either case, you need to know.

Observer Fund Profile

Each month the Observer provides in-depth profiles of notable funds that you’d otherwise not hear of.  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. 

RiverPark Strategic Income (RSIVX): RSIVX sits at the core of Cohanzick’s competence, a conservative yet opportunistic strategy that they’ve pursued for two decades and that offers the prospect of doubling the returns of its very fine Short-Term High Yield Fund.

Elevator Talk: Oliver Pursche, GMG Defensive Beta Fund (MPDAX)

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. 

The traditional approach to buffering the stock market’s volatility without entirely surrendering the prospect of adequate returns was to divide the portfolio between (domestic, large cap) stocks and (domestic, investment grade) bonds, at a ratio of roughly 60/40.  That strategy worked passably well as long as stocks could be counted on to produce robust returns and bonds could be counted on to post solid though smaller gains without fail.  As the wheels began falling off that strategy, advisors began casting about for alternative strategies. 

Some, like the folks at Montebello Partners, began drawing lessons from the experience of hedge funds and institutional alternatives managers.  Their conclusion was that each asset class had one or two vital contributions to make to the health of the portfolio, but that exposure to those assets had to be actively managed if they were going to have a chance of producing equity-like (perhaps “equity-lite”) returns with substantial downside protection.

Their strategy is manifested in GMG Defensive Beta, which launched in the summer of 2009.  Its returns have generally overwhelmed those of its multi-alternative peers (top 3% over the past three years, substantially higher returns since inception) though at the cost of substantially higher volatility.  Morningstar rates it as a five-star fund, while Lipper gives it four stars for both Total Return and Consistency of Return and five stars for Capital Preservation.

Oliver Pursche is the president of Gary M Goldberg Financial Services (hence GMG) one of the four founding co-managers of MPDAX.  Here are his 218 words (on whole, durn close to target) on why you should consider a multi alternative strategy:

Markets are up, and as a result, so are the risks of a correction. I don’t think that a 2008-like crash is in the cards, but we could certainly see a 20% correction at some point. If you agree with me, protecting your hard fought gains makes all the sense in the world, which is why I believe low-volatility and multi-alternative funds like our GMG Defensive Beta Fund will continue to gain favor with investors. The problem is that most of these new funds have no, or only a short track-record, so it’s difficult to know how they will actually perform in a prolonged downturn. One thing is certain, in the absence of a longer-term track record, low fees and low turnover tend to be advantageous to investors. This is why our fund is a no-load fund and we cap our fees at 1.49%, well below most of our peers, and our cap gain distributions have been minimal.

From my perspective, if you’re looking to continue to have market exposure, but don’t want all of the risks associated with investing in the S&P 500, our fund is ideally suited. We’re strategic and tactical at the same time and have demonstrated our ability to remain disciplined, which is (I think) why Morningstar has awarded us a 5 Star ranking.

MPDAX is a no-load fund with a single share class.  The minimum initial investment is $1,000.   Expenses are 1.49% on about $27 million in assets.

The fund’s website is functional but spare.  You get the essential information, but there’s no particular wealth of insight or commentary on this strategy.  There’s a Morningstar reprint available but you should be aware that the file contains one page of data reporting and five pages of definitions and disclaimers.

Our earlier Elevator Talks were:

1. February 2013: Tom Kerr, Rocky Peak Small Cap Value (RPCSX), whose manager has a 14 year track record in small cap investing and a passion for discovering “value” in the intersection of many measures.  We’re saddened to report that Tom chose to liquidate the fund.
2. March 2013: Dale Harvey, Poplar Forest Partners (PFPFX and IPFPX), a concentrated, contrarian value stock fund that offers “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest with a successful American Funds manager who went out on his own.”
3. April 2013: Bayard Closser, Vertical Capital Income Fund (VCAPX), “a closed-end interval fund, VCAPX invests in whole mortgage loans and first deeds of trust. We purchase the loans from lenders at a deep discount and service them ourselves.”
4. May 2013: Jim Hillary, LS Opportunity Fund (LSOFX), a co-founder of Marsico Capital Management whose worry that “the quality of research on Wall Street continues to decline and investors are becoming increasingly concerned about short-term performance” led to his faith in “in-depth research and long-term orientation in our high conviction ideas.”
5. July 2013: Casey Frazier, Versus Capital Multi-Manager Real Estate Income Fund (VCMRX), a second closed-end interval fund whose portfolio “includes real estate private equity and debt, public equity and debt, and broad exposure across asset types and geographies. We target a mix of 70% private real estate with 30% public real estate to enhance liquidity, and our objective is to produce total returns in the 7 – 9% range net of fees.”
6. August 2013: Brian Frank, Frank Value Fund (FRNKX), a truly all-cap value fund with a simple, successful discipline: if one part of the market is overpriced, shop elsewhere.
7. August 2013: Ian Mortimer and Matthew Page of Guinness Atkinson Inflation Managed Dividend (GAINX), a global equity fund that pursues firms with “sustainable and potentially rising dividends,” which also translates to firms with robust business models and consistently high return on capital.
8. September 2013: Steven Vannelli of GaveKal Knowledge Leaders (GAVAX), which looks to invest in “the best among global companies that are tapping a deep reservoir of intangible capital to generate earnings growth,” where “R&D, design, brand and channel” are markers of robust intangible capital. From launch through the end of June, 2013, the fund modestly outperformed the MSCI World Index and did so with two-thirds less volatility
9. October 2013: Bashar Qasem of Wise Capital (WISEX), which provides investors with an opportunity for global diversification in a fund category (short term bonds) mostly distinguished by bland uniformity.
10. November 2013: Jeffrey Ringdahl of American Beacon Flexible Bond (AFXAX) gives teams from Brandywine Global, GAM and PIMCO incredible leeway wth which to pursue “positive total return regardless of market conditions.” Since inception the fund has noticeably outrun its “nontraditional bond” peers with reasonable volatility.

Conference Call Highlights

On December 9^th, about 50 of us spent a rollicking hour with David Sherman of Cohanzick Asset Management, discussing his new fund: RiverPark Strategic Income Fund (RSIVX).  I’m always amazed at how excited folks can get about short-term bonds and dented credits.  It’s sort of contagious.

David’s first fund with RiverPark, the now-closed Short Term High Yield (RPHYX), was built around Cohanzick’s strategy for managing its excess cash.  Strategic Income represents their seminal, and core, strategy to fixed-income investing.  Before launching Cohanzick in 1996, David was a Vice President of Leucadia National Corporation, a holding company that might be thought of as a mini-Berkshire Hathaway. His responsibilities there included helping to manage a $3 billion investment portfolio which had an opportunistic distressed securities flair.  When he founded Cohanzick, Leucadia was his first client.  They entrusted him with $150 million, this was the strategy he used to invest it.

Rather than review the fund’s portfolio, which we cover in this month’s profile of it (below), we’ll highlight strategy and his response to listener questions.

The fund focuses on “money good” securities.  Those are securities where, if held to maturity, he’s confident that he’ll get his entire principal and all of the interest due to him.  They’re the sorts of securities where, if the issuer files for bankruptcy, he still anticipates eventually receiving his principal and interest plus interest on his interest.  Because he expects to be able to hold securities to maturity, he doesn’t care about “the taper” and its effects – he’ll simply hold on through any kerfuffle and benefit from regular payments that flow in much like an annuity stream.  These are, he says, bonds that he’d have his mother hold.

Given that David’s mother was one of the early investors in the fund, these are bonds his mother holds.  He joked that he serves as a sort of financial guarantor for her standard of living (if her portfolio doesn’t produce sufficient returns to cover her expenses, he has to reach for his checkbook), he’s very motivated to get this right.

While the fund might hold a variety of securities, they hold little international exposure and no emerging markets debt. They’re primarily invested in North American (77%) and European(14%)  corporate debt, in firms where the accounting is clear and nations where the laws are. The fund’s investment mandate is very flexible, so they can actively hedge portfolio positions (and might) and they can buy income-producing equities (but won’t).

The portfolio focuses on non-investment grade securities, mostly in the B – BB range, but that’s consistent with his intention not to lose his investors’ money. He values liquidity in his investments; that is to say, he doesn’t get into investments that he can’t quickly get out of.  The fund has been letting cash build, and it’s now about 30% of the portfolio.  David’s general preference is to get out too early and lose some potential returns, rather than linger too long and suffer the risk of permanent impairment.

There were rather more questions from callers than we had time to field.  Some of the points we did get to talk about:

David is not impressed with the values available in one- to three-year bonds, they’ve been subject to too much buying by the anxious herd.  He’s currently finding better values in three- to five-year bonds, especially those which are not included in the major bond indexes.  There is, he says, “a lot of high yield value outside of indexed issues.”

About 50% of the corporate bond market qualifies as “high yield,” which gives him lots of opportunities.

This could function as one’s core bond portfolio.  While there will be more NAV volatility because of mark-to-market rules (that is, you have to ask “what would I get if I stupidly decided to sell my entire portfolio in the midst of a particular day’s market panic”), the risk of permanent impairment of capital occurs only if he’s made a mistake.

Munis are a possibility, but they’re not currently cheap enough to be attractive.

If there’s a limited supply of a security that would be appropriate for both Short-Term and here, Short-Term gets dibs.

Cohanzick is really good at pricing their portfolio securities.  At one level, they use an independent pricing service.  At another, getting the price right has been a central discipline since the firm’s founding and he’s comfortable with his ability to do so even with relatively illiquid names.

At base, David believes the fund can generate returns in the 7-8% range with minimal risk of capital loss.  Given his record with Cohanzick and RPHYX, we are confident that he’s capable of delivering on that promise.  By way of full disclosure: In aligning our mouths and our money, both Chip and I added RSIVX to our personal portfolios this fall.  Once we work out all of the Observer’s year-end finances, we also intend to transfer a portion of the money now in MFO’s credit union savings account into an investment in this fund.

For folks interested but unable to join us, here’s the complete audio of the hour-long conversation.

The RSIVX conference call

As with all of these funds, we’ve created a new featured funds page for the RiverPark Strategic Income Fund, pulling together all of the best resources we have for the fund.

January Conference Call: Matt Moran, ASTON River Road Long/Short

Last winter we spent time talking with the managers of really promising hedged funds, including a couple who joined us on conference calls.  The fund that best matched my own predilections was ASTON River Road Long/Short (ARLSX), extensive details on which appear on our ARLSX Featured Fund Page.   In our December 2012 call, manager Matt Moran argued that:

1. The fund might outperform the stock market by 200 bps/year over a full, 3-5 year market cycle.
2. The fund can maintain a beta at 0.3 to 0.5, in part because of their systematic Drawdown Plan.
3. Risk management is more important than return management, so all three of their disciplines are risk-tuned.

I was sufficiently impressed that I chose to invest in the fund.  That does not say that we believe this is “the best” long/short fund (an entirely pointless designation), just that it’s the fund that best matched my own concerns and interests.  The fund returned 18% in 2013, placing it in the top third of all long/short funds.

Matt and co-manager Dan Johnson have agreed to join us for a second conversation.  That call is scheduled for Wednesday, January 15, from 7:00 – 8:00 Eastern.  Please note that this is one day later than our original announcement. Matt has been kicking around ideas for what he’d like to talk about.  His short-list includes:

• How we think about our performance in 2013 and, in particular, why we’re satisfied with it given our three mandates (equity-like returns, reduced volatility, capital preservation)
• Where we are finding value on the long side.  It’s a struggle…
• How we’re surviving on the short side.  It’s a huge challenge.  Really, how many marginal businesses can keep hanging on because of the Fed’s historic generosity?  Stocks must ultimately earn what underlying business earns and a slug of these firms are earning …
• But, too, our desire not to be carried out in body bags on short side.
• The fact that we sleep better at night with Drawdown Plan in place.  

HOW CAN YOU JOIN IN?

If you’d like to join in, just click on register and you’ll be taken to the Chorus Call site. In exchange for your name and email, you’ll receive a toll-free number, a PIN and instructions on joining the call. If you register, I’ll send you a reminder email on the morning of the call.

Remember: registering for one call does not automatically register you for another. You need to click each separately. Likewise, registering for the conference call mailing list doesn’t register you for a call; it just lets you know when an opportunity comes up. 

For those of you new to our conference calls, here’s the short version: we set up an audio-only phone conversation, you register and receive an 800-number and a PIN, our guest talks for about 20 minutes on his fund’s genesis and strategy, I ask questions for about 20, and then our listeners get to chime in with questions of their own.  A couple days later we post an .mp3 of the call and highlights of the conversation. 

WOULD AN ADDITIONAL HEADS UP HELP?

Over two hundred readers have signed up for a conference call mailing list. About a week ahead of each call, I write to everyone on the list to remind them of what might make the call special and how to register. If you’d like to be added to the conference call list, just drop me a line.

February Conference Call: Joshua B. Parker and Alan Salzbank, RiverPark / Gargoyle Hedged Value

We extend our conversation with hedged fund managers in a conversation with Messrs. Parker and Salzbank, whose RiverPark / Gargoyle Hedged Value (RGHVX) we profiled last June, but with whom we’ve never spoken. 

Gargoyle is a converted hedge fund.  The hedge fund launched in 1999 and the strategy was converted to a mutual fund on April 30, 2012.  Rather than shorting stocks, the strategy is to hold a diversified portfolio mid- to large-cap value stocks, mostly domestic, and to hedge part of the stock market risk by selling a blend of index call options. That value focus is both distinctive and sensible; the strategy’s stock portfolio has outperformed the S&P500 by 4.5% per year over the past 23 years. The options overlay generates 1.5 – 2% in premium income per month. The fund ended 2013 with a 29% gain, which beat 88% of its long/short peers.

That call is scheduled for Wednesday, February 12, from 7:00 – 8:00 Eastern.  We’ll provide additional details in our February issue.  

HOW CAN YOU JOIN IN?

If you’d like to join in, just click on register and you’ll be taken to the Chorus Call site. In exchange for your name and email, you’ll receive a toll-free number, a PIN and instructions on joining the call. If you register, I’ll send you a reminder email on the morning of the call.

Launch Alert: Vanguard Global Minimum Volatility Fund (VMVFX)

Vanguard Global Minimum Volatility Fund (VMVFX) launched on December 12, 2013.  It’s Vanguard’s answer to the craze for “smart beta,” a strategy that seemingly promises both higher returns and lower risk over time.  Vanguard dismisses the possibility with terms like “new-age investment alchemy,” and promise instead to provide reasonable returns with lower risk than an equity investor would otherwise be subject to.  They are, they say, “trying to deliver broadly diversified exposure to the equity asset class, with lower average volatility over time than the market. We will use quantitative models to assess the expected volatility of stocks and correlation to one another.”  They also intend to hedge currency risk in order to further dampen volatility. 

Most portfolios are constructed with an eye to maximizing returns within a set of secondary constraints (for example, market cap).  Volatility is then a sort of fallout from the system.  Vanguard reverses the process here by working to minimize the volatility of an all-equity portfolio within a set of secondary constraints dealing with diversification and liquidity.  Returns are then a sort of fallout from the design.  Vanguard recently explained the fund’s distinctiveness in Our new fund offering: What it is and what it isn’t.

The fund will be managed by James D. Troyer, James P. Stetler, and Michael R. Roach.  They are members of the management teams for about a dozen other Vanguard funds.

The Investor share class has a $3,000 minimum initial investment.  The opening expense ratio is 0.30%.

MFS made its first foray into low-volatility investing this month, launching MFS Low Volatility Equity (MLVAX) and MFS Low Volatility Global Equity (MVGAX) just one week before Vanguard. The former will target a volatility level that is 20% lower than that of the S&P 500 Index over a full market cycle, while the latter will target 30% less volatility than the MSCI All Country World Index.  The MFS funds charge about four times what Vanguard does.

Launch Alert II: Meridian Small Cap Growth Advisor (MSGAX)

Meridian Small Cap Growth Fund launched on December 16^th.  The prospectus says very little about what the managers will be doing: “The portfolio managers apply a ‘bottom up’ fundamental research process in selecting investments. In other words, the portfolio managers analyze individual companies to determine if a company presents an attractive investment opportunity and if it is consistent with the Fund’s investment strategies and policies.”

Nevertheless, the fund warrants – and will receive – considerable attention because of the pedigree of its managers.  Chad Meade and Brian Schaub managed Janus Triton (JATTX) together from 2006 – May 2013.  During their tenure, they managed to turn an initial $10,000 investment into $21,400 by the time they departed; their peers would have parlayed $10,000 into just over $14,000.  The more remarkable fact is that the managed it with a low turnover (39%, half the group average), relatively low risk (beta = .80, S.D. about 3 points below their peers) strategy.  Understandably, the fund’s assets soared to $6 billion and it morphed from focused on small caps to slightly larger names.  Regrettably, Janus decided that wasn’t grounds for closing the fund.

Messrs Meade and Schaub joined Arrowpoint Partners in May 2013.  Arrowpoint famously is the home of a cadre of Janus alumni (or escapees, depending):  David Corkins, Karen Reidy, Tony Yao, Minyoung Sohn and Rick Grove.  Together they managed over $2 billion.  In June, they purchased Aster Investment Management, advisor to the Meridian funds, adding nearly $3 billion more in assets.  We’ll reach out to the Arrowpoint folks early in the new year.

The Advisor share class is available no-load and NTF through brokerages like Scottrade, with a $2,500 minimum initial investment.  The opening expense ratio is 1.60%.

Funds in Registration

New mutual funds must be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission before they can be offered for sale to the public. The SEC has a 75-day window during which to call for revisions of a prospectus; fund companies sometimes use that same time to tweak a fund’s fee structure or operating details.

Funds in registration this month are eligible to launch in March, 2014 and some of the prospectuses do highlight that date.

And there were a lot of funds targeting a year-end launch. Every day David Welsch, firefighter/EMT/fund researcher, scours new SEC filings to see what opportunities might be about to present themselves. This month he tracked down 15 no-load retail funds in registration, which represents our core interest. That number is down from what we’d normally see because these funds won’t launch until February 2014; whenever possible, firms prefer to launch by December 30^th and so force a lot of funds into the pipeline in October.

Interesting entries this month include:

Artisan High Income Fund will invest in high yield corporate bonds and debt.  There are two major distinctions here.  First, it is Artisan’s first fixed-income fund.  Second, Artisan has always claimed that they’re only willing to hire managers who will be “category-killers.”  If you look at Artisan’s returns, you’ll get a sense of how very good they are at that task.  Their new high-yield manager, and eventual head of a new, autonomous high-yield team, is Bryan C. Krug who ran the $10 billion, five star Ivy High Income Fund (WHIYX) for the past seven years.  The minimum initial investment will be $1000 for Investor shares and $250,000 for Advisor shares.  The initial expense ratio will be 1.25% for both Investor and Advisor shares.

Brown Advisory Japan Alpha Opportunities Fund will pursue total return by investing principally in Japanese stocks.  The fund will be constructed around a series of distinct “sleeves,” each with its own distinct risk profile but they don’t explain what they might be. They may invest in common and preferred stock, futures, convertibles, options, ADRs and GDR, REITs and ETFs.  While they advertise an all-cap portfolio, they do flag small cap and EM risks.  The fund will be managed by a team from Wellington Management.  The minimum initial investment will be $5000.  The initial expense ratio will be 1.36%. 

Perritt Low Priced Stock Fund will pursue long-term capital appreciation by investing in small cap stocks priced at $15 or less.  I’m a bit ambivalent but could be talked into liking it.  The lead manager also runs Perritt Microcap (PRCGX) and Ultra MicroCap (PREOX), both of which are very solid funds with good risk profiles.  Doubtless he can do it here.  That said, the whole “under $15” thing strikes me as a marketing ploy and a modestly regrettable one. What benefit does that stipulation really offer the investors?  The minimum initial investment will be $1000, reduced to $250 for all sorts of good reasons, and the initial expense ratio will be 1.5%. 

Manager Changes

On a related note, we also tracked down 40 fund manager changes.  The most intriguing of those include what appears to be the abrupt dismissal of Ken Feinberg, one of the longest-serving managers in the Davis/Selected Funds, and PIMCO’s decision to add to Bill Gross’s workload by having him fill in for a manager on sabbatical.

Updates

There are really very few emerging markets investors which whom I’d trust my money.  Robert Gardiner and Andrew Foster are at the top of the list.  There are notable updates on both this month.

Grandeur Peak Emerging Opportunities (GPEOX) launched two weeks ago, hasn’t released a word about its portfolio, has earned one half of one percent for its investors . . . and has drawn nearly $100 million in assets.  Mr. Gardiner and company have a long-established plan to close the fund at $200 million.  I’d encourage interested parties to (quickly!) read our review of Grandeur Peak’s flagship Global Reach fund.  If you’re interested in a reasonably assertive, small- to mid-cap fund, you may have just a few weeks to establish your account before the fund closes.  The advisor does not intend to market the fund to the general public until February 1, by which time it might well be at capacity.

Investors understandably assume that an e.m. small cap fund is necessarily, and probably substantially, riskier than a more-diversified e.m. fund. That assumption might be faulty. By most measures (standard deviation and beta, for example) it’s about 15% more volatile than the average e.m. fund, but part of that volatility is on the upside. In the past five years, emerging markets equities have fallen in six of 20 quarters.   We can look at the performance of DFA’s semi-passive Emerging Markets Small Cap Fund (DEMSX) to gauge the downside of these funds. 

The same pattern is demonstrated by Templeton E.M. Small Cap (TEMMX): higher beta but surprising resilience in declining quarters.  For aggressive investors, a $2,000 foot-in-the-door position might well represent a rational balance between the need for more information and the desire to maintain their options.

Happily, there’s an entirely-excellent alternative to GPEOX and it’s not (yet) near closing to new investors.

Seafarer Overseas Growth & Income (SFGIX and SIGIX) is beginning to draw well-earned attention. Seafarer offers a particularly risk-conscious approach to emerging markets investing.  It offers a compact (40 names), all-cap portfolio (20% in small- and microcap names and 28% in mid-caps, both vastly higher than its peers) that includes both firms domiciled in the emerging markets (about 70%) and those headquartered in the developing world but profiting from the emerging one (30%). It finished 2013 up 5.5%, which puts it in the top tier of all emerging markets funds. 

That’s consistent with both manager Andrew Foster’s record at his former charge (Matthews Asian Growth & Income MACSX which was one of the two top Asian funds in existence through his time there) and Seafarer’s record since launch (it has returned 20% since February 2012 while its average peer made less than 4%). Assets had been growing briskly through the fund’s first full year, plateaued for much of 2013 then popped in December: the fund moved from about $40 million in AUM to $55 million in a very short period. That presumably signals a rising recognition of Seafarer’s strength among larger investors, which strikes me as a very good thing for both Seafarer and the investors.

On an unrelated note, Oakseed Opportunity (SEEDX) has added master limited partnerships to its list of investable securities. The guys continue negotiating distribution arrangements; the fund became available on the Fidelity platform in the second week of December, 2013. They were already available through Schwab, Scottrade, TDAmeritrade and Vanguard.

Briefly Noted . . .

The Gold Bullion Strategy Fund (QGLDX) has added a redemption fee of 2.00% for shares sold within seven days of purchase because, really, how could you consider yourself a long-term investor if you’re not willing to hold for at least eight days?

Legg Mason Capital Management Special Investment Trust (LMSAX) will transition from being a small- and mid-cap fund to a small cap and special situations fund. The advisor warns that this will involve an abnormal turnover in the portfolio and higher-than-usual capital gains distributions. The fund has beaten its peers precisely twice in the past decade, cratered in 2007-09, got a new manager in 2011 and has ascended to … uh, mediocrity since then. Apparently “unstable” and “mediocre” is sufficient to justify someone’s decision to keep $750 million in the fund. 

PIMCO’s RealRetirement funds just got a bit more aggressive. In an SEC filing on December 30, PIMCO shifted the target asset allocations to increase equity exposure and decrease real estate, commodities and fixed income.  Here’s the allocation for an individual with 40 years until retirement

Real estate and commodities are an inflation hedge (that’s the “real” part of RealRetirement) and PIMCO’s commitment to them has been (1) unusually high and (2) unusually detrimental to performance.

SMALL WINS FOR INVESTORS

Effective January 2, 2014, BlackRock U.S. Opportunities Portfolio (BMEAX) reopened to new investors. Skeptics might note that the fund is large ($1.6 billion), overpriced (1.47%) and under-performing (having trailed its peers in four of the past five years), which makes its renewed availability a distinctly small win.

Speaking of “small wins,” the Board of Trustees of Buffalo Funds has approved a series of management fees breakpoints for the very solid Buffalo Small Cap Fund (BUFSX).  The fund, with remains open to new investors despite having nearly $4 billion in assets, currently pays a 1.0% management fee to its advisor.  Under the new arrangement, the fee drops by five basis points for assets from $6 to $7 billion, another five for assets from $7-8 and $8-9 then it levels out at 80 bps for assets over $9 billion.  Those gains are fairly minor (the net fee on the fund at $7 billion is $69.5 million under the new arrangement versus $70 million under the old) and the implication that the fund might remain open as it swells is worrisome.

Effective January 1, 2014, Polaris Global Value Fund (PGVFX) has agreed to cap operating expenses at 0.99%.  Polaris, a four-star fund with a quarter billion in assets, currently charges 1.39% so the drop will be substantial. 

The investment minimum for Institutional Class shares of Yacktman Focused Fund (YAFFX) has dropped from $1,000,000 to $100,000.

Vanguard High-Yield Corporate Fund (VWEHX) has reopened to new investors.  Wellington Management, the fund’s advisor, reports that  “Cash flow to the fund has subsided, which, along with a change in market conditions, has enabled us to reopen the fund.”

CLOSINGS (and related inconveniences)

Driehaus Select Credit Fund (DRSLX) will close to most new investors on January 31, 2014. The strategy capacity is about $1.5 billion and the fund already holds $1 billion, with more flowing in, so they decided to close it just as they closed its sibling, Driehaus Active Income (LCMAX). You might think of it as a high-conviction, high-volatility fixed income hedge fund.

Hotchkis & Wiley Mid-Cap Value (HWMIX) is slated to close to new investors on March 1, 2014. Ted, our board’s most senior member, opines “Top notch MCV fund, 2.8 Billion in assets, and superior returns.”  I nod.

Sequoia (SEQUX) closed to new investors on December 10^th. Their last closure lasted 25 years.

Vanguard Capital Opportunity Fund (VHCOX), managed by PRIMECAP Management Company, has closed again. It closed in 2004, opened the door a crack in 2007 and fully reopened in 2009.  Apparently the $2 billion in new assets generated a sense of concern, prompting the reclosure.

OLD WINE, NEW BOTTLES

Aberdeen Diversified Income Fund (GMAAX), a tiny fund distinguished more for volatility than for great returns, can now invest in closed-end funds.  Two other Aberdeen funds, Dynamic Allocation (GMMAX) and Diversified Alternatives (GASAX), are also now permitted  to invest, to a limited extent, in “certain direct investments” and so if you’ve always wanted exposure to certain direct investments (as opposed to uncertain ones), they’ve got the funds for you.

American Independence Core Plus Fund (IBFSX) has changed its name to the American Independence Boyd Watterson Core Plus Fund, presumably in the hope that the Boyd Watterson name will work marketing magic.  Not entirely sure why that would be the case, but there it is.

Effective December 31, 2013, FAMCO MLP & Energy Income Fund became Advisory Research MLP & Energy Income Fund. Oddly, the announcement lists two separate “A” shares with two separate ticker symbols (INFIX and INFRX).

In February Compass EMP Long/Short Fixed Income Fund (CBHAX) gets rechristened Compass EMP Market Neutral Income Fund and it will no longer be required to invest at least 80% in fixed income securities.  The change likely reflects the fact that the fund is underwater since its November 2013 inception (its late December NAV was $9.67) and no one cares (AUM is $28 million).

In yet another test of my assertion that giving yourself an obscure and nonsensical name is a bad way to build a following (think “Artio”), ING reiterated its plan to rebrand itself as Voya Financial.  The name change will roll out over the first half of 2014.

As of early December, Gabelli Value Fund became Gabelli Value 25 Fund (GABVX). And no, it does not hold 25 stocks (the portfolio has nearly 200 names).  Here’s their explanation: “The name change highlights the Fund’s overweighting of its core 25 equity positions and underscores the upcoming 25^th anniversary of the Fund’s inception.” And yes, that does strike me as something that The Mario came up with and no one dared contradict.

GMO, as part of a far larger fund shakeup (see below), has renamed and repurposed four of its institutional funds.  GMO International Core Equity Fund becomes GMO International Large/Mid Cap Equity Fund, GMO International Intrinsic Value Fund becomes GMO International Equity Fund, GMO International Opportunities Equity Allocation Fund becomes GMO International Developed Equity Allocation Fund, and GMO World Opportunities Equity Allocation Fund morphs (slightly) into GMO Global Developed Equity Allocation Fund, all on February 12, 2014. Most of the funds tweaked their investment strategy statements to comply with the SEC’s naming rules which say that if you have a distinct asset class in your name (large/midcap equity), you need to have at least 80% of your portfolio in that class. 

Effective February 28, MainStay Intermediate Term Bond Fund (MTMAX) becomes MainStay Total Return Bond Fund.

Nuveen NWQ Flexible Income Fund (NWQIX), formerly Nuveen NWQ Equity Income Fund has been rechristened as Nuveen NWQ Global Equity Income Fund, with James Stephenson serving as its sole manager.  If you’d like to get a sense of what “survivorship bias” looks like, you might check out Nuveen’s SEC distributions filing and count the number of funds with lines through their names.

Old Westbury Global Small & Mid Cap Fund (OWSMX) has been rechristened as Old Westbury Small & Mid Cap Fund. It’s no longer required to have a global portfolio, but might.  It’s been very solid, with about 20% of its portfolio in ETFs and the rest in individual securities.

At the meeting on December 3, 2013, the Board approved a change in Old Westbury Global Opportunities Fund’s (OWGOX) name to Old Westbury Strategic Opportunities Fund.  Let’s see: 13 managers, $6 billion in assets, and a long-term record that trails 70% of its peers.  Yep, a name change is just what’s needed!

OFF TO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

Jeez, The Shadow is just a wild man here.

On December 6, 2013, the Board of the Conestoga Funds decided to close and liquidate the Conestoga Mid Cap Fund (CCMGX), effective February 28, 2014.  At the same time, they’re launched a SMid cap fund with the same management team.  I wrote the advisor to ask why this isn’t just a scam to bury a bad track record and get a re-do; they could, more easily, just have amended Mid Cap’s principal investment strategy to encompass small caps and called it SMid Cap.  They volunteered to talk then reconsidered, suggesting that they’d be freer to walk me through their decision once the new fund is up and running. I’m looking forward to the opportunity.

Dynamic Energy Income Fund (DWEIS), one of the suite of former DundeeWealth funds, was liquidated on December 31, 2013.

Fidelity has finalized plans for the merger of Fidelity Europe Capital Appreciation Fund (FECAX) into Fidelity Europe Fund (FIEUX), which occurs on March 21.

The institutional firm Grantham, Mayo, van Otterloo (GMO) is not known for precipitous action, so their December announcement of a dozen fund closures is striking.  One set of funds is simply slated to disappear:

In addition, the Board has approved the termination of GMO Asset Allocation International Small Companies Fund and GMO International Large/Mid Cap Value Fund, neither of which had commenced operations.

They then added two sets of fund mergers: GMO Debt Opportunities Fund into GMO Short-Duration Collateral Fund (with the freakish coda that “GMO Short-Duration Collateral Fund is not pursuing an active investment program and is gradually liquidating its portfolio” but absorbing Debt Opportunities gives it reason to live) and GMO U.S. Flexible Equities Fund into GMO U.S. Core Equity Fund, which is expected to occur on or about January 24, 2014.

Not to be outdone, The Hartford Mutual Funds announced ten fund mergers and closures themselves.  Hartford Growth Fund (HGWAX) is merging with Hartford Growth Opportunities Fund (HGOAX), Hartford Global Growth (HALAX) merges with Hartford Capital Appreciation II (HCTAX) and Hartford Value (HVFAX) goes into Hartford Value Opportunities (HV)AX), all effective April 7, 2014. None of which, they note, requires shareholder approval. I have real trouble seeing any upside for the funds’ investors, since most going from one sub-par fund into another and will see expenses drop by just a few basis points. The exceptions are the value funds, both of which are solid and economically viable on their own. In addition, Hartford is pulling the plug on its entire target-date retirement line-up. The funds slated for liquidation are Hartford Target Retirement 2010 through 2050. That dirty deed will be done on June 30, 2014. 

Highbridge Dynamic Commodities Strategy Fund (HDSAX) is slated to be liquidated and dissolved (an interesting visual image) on February 7, 2014. In the interim, it’s going to cash.

John Hancock Sovereign Investors Fund (SOVIX) will merge into John Hancock Large Cap Equity Fund (TAGRX), on or about April 30, 2014.

Principal SmallCap Growth Fund II (PPMIX) will be absorbed by SmallCap Growth Fund I (PGRTX) on or about April 25, 2014.

It’s with some sadness that we bid adieu to Tom Kerr and his Rocky Peak Small Cap Value Fund (RPCSX), which liquidated on December 30.  The fund sagged from “tiny” to “microscopic” by the end of its run, with under a million in assets.  Its performance in 2013 was pretty much calamitous, which was both curious and fatal.  Tom was an experienced manager and sensible guy who will, we hope, find a satisfying path forward. 

In a sort of three-for-one swap, Pax World International Fund (PXIRX) and Pax MSCI EAFE ESG Index ETF (EAPS) are merging to form the Pax World International ESG Index Fund.

On October 21, 2013, the Board of Directors of the T. Rowe Price Summit GNMA Fund (PRSUX) approved a proposed merger with, and into, T. Rowe Price GNMA Fund (PRGMX).

The Vanguard Managed Payout Growth Focus Fund (VPGFX) and Vanguard Managed Payout Distribution Focus Fund (VPDFX) are each to be reorganized into the Vanguard Managed Payout Growth and Distribution Fund (VPGDX) on or about January 17, 2014.

W.P. Stewart & Co. Growth Fund (WPSGX) is merging into the AllianceBernstein Concentrated Growth Fund (WPCSX), which has the same manager, investment discipline and expenses of the WPS fund.  Alliance acquired WPS in December, so the merger was a sort of foregone conclusion.

Wegener Adaptive Growth Fund (WAGFX) decided, on about three days’ notice, to close and liquidate at the end of December, 2013.  It had a couple very solid years (2008 and 2009) then went into the dumper, ending with a portfolio smaller than my retirement account.

A small change

Our navigation menu is growing. If you look along the top of our page, you’ll likely notice that “Featured Funds” is no longer a top-level menu item. Instead the “Featured Funds” category can now be found under the “Fund” or “The Best” menus. Replacing it as a new top-level menu is “Search Tools”, which is the easiest way to directly access new search functionality that Accipiter, Charles, and Chip have been working on for the past few months.

Under Search Tools, you’ll find:

1. Risk Profile – designed to help you understand the different measures of a fund’s risk profile. No one measure of risk captures the full picture and most measures of risk are not self-explanatory. Our Risk Profile reporter allows you to enter a single ticker symbol for any fund and it will generate a short, clear report, in simple, conversational English, that walks you through the various means of risk and returns and will provide you with the profiles for a whole range of possible benchmarks. Alternatively, entering multiple ticker symbols will return a tabular results page, making side-by-side comparisons more convenient.
2. Great Owls – allows you to screen our Great Owl Funds – those which have top tier performance in every trailing period of three years or more – by category or profile. We know that past performance should never be the primary driver of your decision-making, but working from a pool of consistently superior performers and learning more about their risk-return profile strikes us as a sensible place to start.
3. Fund Dashboard – a snapshot of all of the funds we’ve profiled, is updated monthly and is available both as a .pdf and as a searchable and sortable search.
4. Miraculous Multi-Search – Accipiter’s newest screening tool helps us search Charles’ database of risk elements. Searches are available by fund name, category, risk group and age group. There’s even an option to restrict the results to GreatOwl funds. Better yet, you can search on multiple criteria and further refine your results list by choosing to hide certain results.

In Closing . . .

Thank you, dear friends.  It’s been a remarkable year.  In December of 2012, we served 9000 readers.  A year later, 24,500 readers made 57,000 visits to the Observer in December – a gain of 150%.  The amount of time readers spend on site is up, too, by about 50% over last year.  The percentage of new visitors is up 57%.  But almost 70% of visits are by returning readers.

It’s all the more striking because we’re the antithesis of a modern news site: our pieces tend to be long, appear once a month and try to be reflective and intelligent.  NPR had a nice piece that lamented the pressure to be “first, loud and sensational” (This is (not) the most important story of the year, 12/29/2013).  The “reflective and intelligent” part sort of reflects our mental image of who you are. 

We’ve often reminded folks of their ability to help the Observer financially, either through our partnership with Amazon (they rebate us about 7% of the value of items purchased through our link) or direct contributions.  Those are both essential and we’re deeply grateful to the dozens of folks who’ve acted on our behalf.  This month we’d like to ask for a different sort of support, one which might help us make the Observer better in the months ahead.

Would you tell us a bit about who you are and why you’re here?  We do not collect any information about you when you visit. The cosmically-talented Chip found a way to embed an anonymous survey directly in this essay, so that you could answer a few questions without ever leaving the comfort of your chair.  What follows are six quick questions.  We’re setting aside questions about our discussion board for now, since it’s been pretty easy to keep in touch with the folks there.  Complete as many as you’re comfortable with.

We’ll share as soon as we hear back from you.

Thanks to Deb (the first person ever to set up an automatic monthly contribution to the site, which was really startling when we found out), to David and the other contributors scattered (mostly) in warm states (and Indianapolis), and to friends who’ve shared books, cookies, well-wishes and holiday cheer.

Finally, thanks to the folks whose constant presence makes the Observer happen: the folks who’ve spent this entire century supporting the discussion board (BobC, glampig, rono, Slick, the indefatigable Ted, and Whakamole among them) and the hundred or so folks regularly on the board; The Shadow, who can sense the presence of interesting SEC filings from a mile away; Accipiter, whose programming skills – generally self-taught – lie behind our fund searches; Ed, who puzzles and grumbles; Charles, who makes data sing; and the irreplaceable Chip, friend, partner and magician.  I’m grateful to you all and look forward to the adventures of the year ahead.

As ever,