Anybody who has read my first book knows that I take a mostly dim view of active management. Still, this week I wrote about an episode central to my upcoming book that proves an exception: how active managers handled meme stocks.
When the market values of GameStop, and AMC went up several hundred or thousand percent based on no change in their fundamental value, active fund managers did the obvious thing – they dumped them and moved on. But index funds, which tend to beat those active managers in the long run, held tight with “diamond hands” because they have to. In some cases they bought more at inflated valuations as their assets grew or as those companies issued shares to their now almost entirely retail base of owners. The only passive investor I’m aware of that was able to take the money and run was Dimensional Fund Advisors (I interviewed their deputy head of portfolio management, Mary Phillips, for the column). Even today, with their share prices (in my opinion) still grossly elevated, the main owners of the meme stocks are the self-described “apes,” many of whom believe there is still a short squeeze looming because of phantom shares.
Active fund managers shouldn’t look a gift primate in the mouth. The last year that funds benchmarked to the Morningstar Large Blend category outperformed that benchmark was in 2013 and before that it was 2009, according to a study by Hartford Funds. Index funds have strung together several consecutive winning years over their active counterparts during extended bull markets in the past, too—for example between 1994 and 1999.
This is one of those cases when owning an index fund can be frustrating. As of today, the top two holdings in the Russell 2000 Value Index – let me repeat, “value” – are AMC and Avis Budget Group, another company that recently got the meme treatment for discussing the addition of electric vehicles to its fleet. Whatever.
Spencer Jakab 