Do Nothing, Make Money

摘要

It would be reasonable to assume that the professionals running CalPERS, the California pension fund with $300 billion in assets, would be good at picking stocks. Or at least reasonably good at picking other smart people to pick stocks for them. But in the past year, CalPERS has made two decisions that are telling for all investors when it comes to trying to outperform the market. Late last year, the pension fund signaled its intention to move more assets from active management into passively managed index funds. These are funds in which you buy a market, such as the S&P 500 or the Russell 2000, unlike mutual funds that try to select winners within a given class of equities. More recently, CalPERS said it would also pull out the $4 billion it has invested in hedge funds. Although hedge-fund honchos make headlines with their personal wealth, the industry has significantly lagged the market in the past three years. "Call it capitulation or sobriety: it's saying that we can't beat the market and we can't find managers who can beat the market, and even if they can, their fee structures are overwhelming," says Mitch Tuchman, CEO of Rebalance IRA, an investment adviser focused on index-fund-only portfolios.