We always try to do things right for you at Wellspring Financial Partners. Now, you’d expect that I would say that and, to be frank, I’m sure Wells Fargo might have said the same thing to their customers over the last couple of years. Really, I’m sure they did! For both our sakes’ let’s move beyond Wells Fargo and for the sake of objectivity let’s look for outside evidence to make sure it is jiving with what Wellspring is saying. If it is, then you should be as energized as the old Duracell battery bunny.
In the time leading up to the formation of Wellspring Financial Partners a HUGE amount of research went into understanding the very foundation of the financial industry. Research about EVERYTHING – the financial services nascent structure and how it evolved, it’s various investments, how it was regulated, who got paid and how they got paid, economic theory, models and practical formulas, behavioral finance (how people make decisions on money matters), higher level finance, the statistics involved, and most important of all, its investments historical results. It was intense, but the more research that was done, the more the Company was bothered by this industry’s complicity for what we’ll simply call “slight-of-hand” marketing. A deep sense of moral wrong was creeping in.
If you were so inclined, you could read the original thesis of a young PhD student at Princeton by the name of – John Bogle. You probably know that name as the founder of Vanguard. It was some of his seminal work that began evaluating how investments actually worked, and more particularly how investment managers were doing vs. throwing darts against the wall to pick investments. Not kidding here. He found that the expensive clothes, the marketing material, and the earnestness of Wall Street fund managers, did not match their stock picking prowess. Keep in mind those results were in the 1950’s, and in the ensuing 60 years, the studies have borne out again and again that fund managers who actively try to pick stocks / market sectors / market good times to buy (or bad times coming – time to get out) don’t pick that well. The graph in figure 1 below depicts this reality.
It summarizes the extent of failure for all the active fund managers when measuring their results for the last 5-years stacked up against ‘dumb’ indices (i.e. throwing darts against the wall). The average failure rate; 77.6%, and this is only 5-years’ worth of data! It gets worse if you go to 10 years, and you might imagine what it does after 20.
NO, wait. Someone measured what happens if you go out 20 years in a well-diversified portfolio. Actually, three different groups studied it and found that your likelihood of falling short on what you deserve is a staggering 99%!. Forget about bad morals, we’re talking about legalized robbery.
Thus, in the beginning, when the first retail ‘index’ funds were formed, they were laughed at. Then, this idea persisted as “the little train that could”. Most recently, John Bogle was profiled by the Wall Street Journal for his impactful and illustrious career. How has his little train done??
“According to Bank of America, $600 billion in investor cash has exited actively managed funds since the 2008 crash, while some $961 billion has flowed into index-style investments of the sort pioneered by Vanguard[i].”
In summary, you ARE doing the right things. By the above excerpt, you can see all the smart money is going this way (and again your investments are a little better than the index but still passive). You can’t control the market, or its “when’s”, but you can participate in the market to receive the benefit of thousands of entrepreneurs and companies attempting to do the right things to grow…and all without taking the risk of betting it all on that one company, but instead betting on thousands of them.
Now you know.
[i] “John Bogle; The Undisputed Champion Of The Long Run” (Holman Jenkins, Wall Street Journal, September 2, 2016)
