Reform needed at the NC Pension Fund.

Andy Silton has a nice piece in today's N&O in which he criticizes the management of the state pension fund.  First - the information provided by the Treasurer's office is awful.   It is almost impossible to figure out where the money is invested and what the fees are and the information is always out of date.

Second, the Treasurer seems to be pursuing a "pick winners" strategy.   This is a fool's errand.   You can't reliably pick winners in today's financial markets.  All you will end up doing is paying high fees to so-called "experts" and getting average performance in exchange.   A mountain of evidence shows this to be true.

What is worse is that the pension fund continues to move into Private Equity and Hedge Funds - both of which are incredibly expensive and do not provide the return for the risk and costs.  As Andy correctly points out, the risk of these assets is understated because they don't trade daily in the markets.

I've been making these arguments for a few years now and during that time the fees paid by the pension fund have gone up from about $300 million/year to about $500 million/year.  

This isn't small change.   The state of North Carolina pays half a billion dollars a year to Wall Street firms who provide worse performance than if the State just indexed the money.  At some point you have to question whether the Treasurer actually understands basic finance.

New editors of the Financial Review

A little shameless self promotion. Srini Krishnamurthy and myself are honored to take over as editors of the Financial Review.
The full details are over on the Poole College of Management site

The Financial Review website is here: financialreview.poole.ncsu.edu

The hidden risks in target date funds.

My dissertation chair and coauthor, Jay Ritter talks about some of the risks in target date funds.  His primary concern is that these funds tilt towards bonds which implicitly exposes the investor to more inflation risk.

I've blogged about target date funds before, and how they are like hotdogs, but not in a good way. 

How many active funds beat the SP 500 over the past 8 years?

4   

That's out of more than 7,000 mutual funds.

Remind me again why anyone uses active management?


Source:  http://thereformedbroker.com/2015/05/12/how-many-active-mutual-funds-have-beaten-the-sp-500-in-8-consecutive-years/

It's a great quarter guys

My colleague Don shared this.   Apparently, more often than not, equity analysts will tell CEOs "it's a great quarter guys".

It is pretty common for "great quarter" stocks to tank shortly thereafter.

The fact that the analysts are so cosy with the CEOs of the companies that they cover says it all.   As I used to say to my students in my equity analysis course - you don't work for the company and you don't owe the company anything.  Your analysis must be at arms length, otherwise you risk suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

Spoofing and and herd behavior

John Cochrane (of U. Chicago) has an enlightening post about the practice of spoofing (creating fake orders to lure other traders to do stupid things).   Suffice to say, Cochrane isn't a big fan of regulation that prevents traders from being dumb.   He's probably right.

NC Pension Fund Fees Approach $500 Million

Andy Silton does the math and reports that fees for the pension fund are approaching $500 Million.

Just so we are clear here, that's $500,000,000.

So what are we getting for all these fees?   Apparently not a whole lot of extra performance - which is no surprise to anyone who believes that markets are pretty efficient (they are).

Silton points out that otherwise the fund is in good health - which is good, but that doesn't make wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year any less bad.


The question we should ask then is "how much should these fees be?"

I'd answer that for such a huge portfolio, 0.1% of assets is a good start, as I can pay only 0.18% for $3000 with Vanguard and it seems reasonable to assume that $90 billion would get some sort of discount.

So assuming $90 billion in the fund, 0.1% fee would yield $90 million in fees.  But even if you go with the Vanguard fee of 0.18%, we're still only looking at $162 million.   That's $338 million less that what we are paying.