Beat the Market? Not Likely

IN 1963, the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote a delightful book about the initial, disastrous year of the New York Mets.

- JAMES K. GLASSMAN

They won just one-fourth of the games they played, the lowest proportion in Major League history, a record that still stands. But it was the title of Breslin’s book—a quote from Mets manager Casey Stengel— that keeps swirling in my head when I think about the stock market: Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

As evidence, consider that the majority of people who manage mutual funds—men and women who devote their waking hours to trying to select stocks and bonds—can’t beat the market. How hard should it be for a smart, dedicated human to do better than the average of all investors?

Twice a year, S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes a sophisticated analysis that compares the performance of actively managed stock and bond funds against their benchmark indexes. The results, which go back to 2002, are called SPIVA (for S&P Indices Versus Active) scorecards, and they are devastating. SPIVA scorecards use returns by active managers after accounting for fees (but not taxes). The scorecards compare a fund’s performance against its benchmark and correct for what is called survivorship bias—that is, they include the returns of funds that later were merged or liquidated.

The most recent SPIVA scorecard, through June 30, 2024, showed that a little more than three-fourths of all U.S. stock funds (76.2%) failed to beat the S&P 1500 Composite index over the previous 12 months. But if you think that’s bad, look at the long term. Over 10 years, 90.1% of the funds underperformed the benchmark.

Between 2010 and 2024, largecapitalization domestic equity funds failed to beat their benchmark, the S&P 500, in every year—even in the three years when the index declined. (Because active funds keep a buffer of cash, they should beat the S&P 500 in down years even if all they hold is the same stock portfolio as the index itself.)