Friday, March 14, 2008

Can You Beat the Market? It’s a $100 Billion Question

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.


The study, “The Cost of Active Investing,” began circulating earlier this year as an academic working paper. Its author is Kenneth R. French, a finance professor at Dartmouth; he is known for his collaboration with Eugene F. Fama, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, in creating the Fama-French model that is widely used to calculate risk-adjusted performance.

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