Why Investors Cannot Outperform Benchmarks

I wrote this five years ago on Medium, but I have some new comments below. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/why-investors-cannot-outperform-simple-benchmarks-d6a587a54967

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So many people are focused on fees, liquidity and strategy transparency. Well, everyone can access their beloved index funds at zero fees with daily liquidity and easily find how the indexes, such as the S&P 500, are constructed.

Yet the epidemic of underperformance continues. Most investors earn nowhere near the returns of their investment of choice, including index funds.

Offering the lowest fees, most frequent liquidity and transparency into how the strategy works isn’t enough. Managers need to come up with a way to keep investors on board during the inevitable ups and downs. Performance chasing must not be accepted. It’s a death sentence for long-term returns.