πŸ“ˆ TKer by Sam Ro

πŸ“ˆ TKer by Sam Ro

'Past performance is' clearly 'no guarantee of future results' πŸ“Š

Top fund managers rarely stay on top. Market-beating managers rarely keep beating the market. πŸ“‰

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Sam Ro, CFA
May 09, 2025
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Very few top performing fund managers stay on top. (Source: SPDJI)

It’s hard enough to construct and manage a stock portfolio in a way that beats the competition.

Even if you are a fund manager who generated industry-leading returns in one year, history says it’s an almost insurmountable task to stay on top consistently in subsequent years.

S&P Dow Jones Indices (SPDJI) just published their latest Persistence Scorecard, which tracks the performance of actively managed funds over the past five years through 2024. Just 4.21% of all U.S. equity funds in the top half of performance during the first year were able to remain in the top during the four subsequent years. Only 2.42% of U.S. large-cap funds remained in the top half. (See the chart above.)

No funds β€” literally 0.0% β€” remained in the top quartile of performance over the past five years.

β€œSkill is likely to persist, but luck is ephemeral,” SPDJI analysts wrote. β€œThe Persistence Scorecard demonstrates that consistent outperformance, both relative to peers and versus the benchmark, is typically hard to find.β€œ

The results aren’t much better when you take a closer look πŸ”Ž

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