Monday, March 10, 2008

Can You Beat the Market? It’s a $100 Billion Question - New York Times

Ken French has done it again! Definitely a superstar! From the NY Times:

Can You Beat the Market? It’s a $100 Billion Question - New York Times:
"INVESTORS collectively spend around $100 billion a year trying to beat the stock market. That’s the finding of a rigorous effort to measure the total costs of Americans’ efforts to surpass the returns they would have received by simply holding a stock index fund. The huge price tag helps explain why beating a buy-and-hold strategy is so difficult."
and later:
"...despite many developments that greatly reduced the cost of trading, like deeply discounted brokerage commissions, a narrowing in bid-asked spreads, and a big reduction in front-end loads, or sales charges, paid to mutual fund companies...the portion of stocks’ aggregate market capitalization spent on trying to beat the market has stayed remarkably constant, near 0.67 percent."
WOW! An instant classic! I^3!

I am still looking for a link to the actual working paper, if anyone knows where it is please let me know :)
But did find out that he also is a cyclist.

3 comments:

Rich said...

Great stuff, thanks for posting that. I have been unable to track down the paper either - hopefully a version will appear on SSRN soon. Its a little arrogant making such huge statements, but not backing them up with your paper online.

Anonymous said...

I recommend not trying to beat the market, but making use of it's movements.

Ofcourse making sure your on the other side of the market is another good strategy. Like the banks are :)

Karen said...

You've probably already found the paper on SSRN, but here's the link.