When To Sell A Fund

When to Sell a Fund

Posted On September 27, 2020 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management /  

As part of monitoring your investments, you should have defined reasons when to sell a fund. It is important to distinguish between market timing and valid reasons for selling. Don’t sell an index fund and buy an actively managed fund just because the active fund has outperformed recently. That is performance chasing – and you need to guard against this.

There are a couple of scenarios when you might want to sell a fund, primarily if it is to fix your portfolio. There is probably not a bad time to do this, although investors often agonize over the timing of moves. We cannot predict the future. If you know your portfolio has problems, make those changes and move on.

Three Sales to Fix Your Portfolio

First, if you have narrow funds, such as a sector fund, I would suggest you sell those and get into a broader index fund. If you are up, and have a nice gain, go ahead and sell. Don’t wait until the fund or stock has tanked. If it has tanked, take your loss and learn a lesson. You may hope that it will come back, but hope is not a good investment rationale. While you are waiting for it to come back, perhaps you could be growing your portfolio in an index fund.

I’m not going to recommend that you try to own individual stocks in your portfolio. That is speculative and a distraction for most investors to growing your wealth. I know many millionaires who invest in funds, but not many who got there with individual stocks. The majority of people who are trading stocks have tiny accounts. According to the NY Times, the popular trading app, Robinhood has only an average account of $4,800. Focus on your accumulation and being a market participant, not a speculator. If you’ve had good luck with individual stocks, take your gains and get into index funds. 

Second, if you are invested in a fund or product that has high expenses, switch to a low-cost index fund. For example, if you have an actively managed fund, an A-share mutual fund with 12b-1 fees, or a fund in a Variable Insurance product, your expense ratio might be 0.75%, 1.00% or more a year. An index fund might be one-tenth of that, 0.10% or less for many categories. When your goal is long-term growth through market participation, costs are a direct drag on your performance. That’s a good reason to sell.

Interestingly, the average active manager often (slightly) beats their benchmark before fees. It’s just that the drag of a 1% expense ratio, in a market that returns 5% or 10%, eats up all the benefits the managers can create. Over time, low expenses are correlated with better performance.

Third, you may want to sell some of your funds to establish your target asset allocation. Most of your performance is based on your overall asset allocation. I see many younger investors who start out 100% in stocks and as they grow their wealth, eventually realize that they need some bonds. Other investors have some bonds, but no target allocation to use for rebalancing. So, start with your recipe first and adjust your funds to fulfill your target allocation. Otherwise, you end up with a poorly diversified portfolio.

Staying Invested

If you are already invested in a low cost, diversified index fund, why sell it ever? I can think of two good reasons: rebalancing and tax loss harvesting. Outside of that, investors can do quite well by having little or no turnover and sticking with low cost Index funds for not just years, but decades.

What aren’t reasons for a long-term investor to sell? Coronavirus. Elections. Business cycles. News.

Sure, those things can impact stock prices in the short-term. But staying the course in an Index Fund seems to work better than any other strategy. So, yes to selling sector funds, single stocks, and high-expense funds to replace them with an Index Fund. Yes to the occasional sale for rebalancing or tax loss harvesting. Outside of those reasons, try to keep your diversified allocation and stick with your index funds. Now, if you are within five years of retirement and are concerned about risks to your retirement income, let’s talk about how to make sure you are on the right path.

I am posting this because right now volatility seems to be picking up into the election. And over the next two months, I worry that a lot of investors are going to feel spooked. You’re going to hear a lot of opinions about what is going to happen. And markets could, indeed, go down. That’s always a possibility. That’s the inescapable reality of being an investor. But, our approach is to stay the course in turbulent times and be patient. As unique as today’s challenges are, there were unique challenges before. Markets prevailed.

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10 Rules for Playing Defense in Investing

Posted On May 31, 2019 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management /  

Stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down. When they rise, it is slow and steady, but when they go down it feels like a free-fall. Given the recent market tumult, I wanted to share my top ten rules for defensive investing.
Defense doesn’t mean that you won’t have losses on days when the market goes down. It means that you avoid unnecessary risks that could really blow up your portfolio, so you can have the confidence to stay with the plan.

1. Diversification is the only free lunch in investing. You should be diversified by company, as well as by sector and country. If your employer issues you stock options or has an Employee Stock Purchase Plan, take every opportunity to sell and diversify elsewhere. Most disaster stories I hear are from people who failed to diversify.

2. Index Funds are the antidote to performance chasing. When you pick a concentrated fund, such as a sector fund or single country fund because of its recent track record, you risk buying at the top and experiencing a painful (and much larger than necessary) drop when the winds change direction. While it’s so easy to find actively managed funds that beat the index over the past year, there is a better than 80% chance that those funds will lag the index over the next five or more years. The Index fund is also likely a fraction of the cost and is also more tax-efficient than an actively managed fund.

Read More: Manager Risk: Avoidable and Unnecessary

3. Asset Allocation is the most important decision you make. Start with a carefully measured recipe so you don’t end up with a random collection of funds and stocks you’ve acquired over the years. If you’ve decided that a 60/40 portfolio is the right mix for your needs, that should be for all market environments, not just while stocks are going up.

4. You are going to be tempted to adjust your Asset Allocation. It is very tough to get this right, because humans are wired to make terrible investing decisions. We want to sell a down market and we want to buy when the market is at all-time highs. Obviously, in hindsight, we should buy when things are really ugly and sell at the peaks. Invest with your brain and not your gut-feeling.

Read More: Are You Making These 6 Market Timing Mistakes

5. Rebalance. When you have a target asset allocation, then the process of rebalancing back to your target levels creates a built-in process of selling assets which have shot up in value and buying assets which have temporarily gone out of favor. This works great with Funds, but don’t try this will individual stocks.

6. We buy stocks for growth and bonds for income and safety. When you try to switch those objectives, things seldom go as planned or hoped. Buying stocks for their yield and safety can easily lead to long-term under performance. Many times you will be better off in a plain vanilla index fund than a basket of super-high dividend stocks or supposedly safe stocks. Many high-yielding stocks are very low quality companies with no growth. When they do eventually cut their dividends, the shares plummet.

Similarly, you can find bonds that as quoted, should yield stock-like returns. Stay away. These could be future bankruptcies.

Read More: Bonds for Safety in 2019

7. Don’t use margin. Keep cash on hand. If you don’t thoroughly understand options, avoid them. Don’t buy penny stocks or stocks on the pink sheets.

8. Dollar Cost Average in every account you can. 401(k) accounts are ideal. You will often make most of your gains on the shares you purchased in a down market, you just won’t know it until later. 

9. Take your losses. Don’t play the imaginary game of “I will sell it when it gets back to even”. If you are in a crummy fund, replace it with a more appropriate fund. We tax-loss harvest in taxable accounts annually and immediately replace each sale with a different fund in the same category (large cap value, emerging markets, etc.). 

Read More: Why You Should Harvest Losses Annually

10. Stick to the Plan. Don’t make abrupt, knee-jerk changes. Investing adjustments should not be all in/all out decisions. Keep opening your statements, but recognize that a bad day, month, quarter, or year doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with your plan. Of course, if you didn’t start with a plan, that’s another story.

We genuinely believe that no one can repeatedly time the market and that the attempts to do create significant risk to your long-term returns. I try to convey this message consistently. Last week, a friend asked if all my clients were panicking about that day’s drop. And I said that I hadn’t gotten a single call that day, because they know we are in it for the long haul and have already positioned their portfolio with their goals in mind. 

It will not surprise you that I think you are more likely to be a successful investor if you work with an advisor who can make sure you start with a plan, stick to an asset allocation, and implement your plan with sensible investments. Along the way, we will rebalance, make adjustments, and monitor your progress. We are looking to help more investors in 2019 and would welcome an opportunity to discuss how our approach could work for you. 

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The Persistence Scorecard

Posted On January 3, 2019 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management /  

As investors begin reviewing their year-end 2018 statements for their 401(k) and other accounts, I know many will want to change funds after a disappointing year. What do investors do? If they have 15 funds available in their plan, they will often sell out of their lagging fund and put money into whichever funds are performing best.

It seems rational enough to believe that a fund manager who is doing well might have above average skills, work harder, or have a better team than other fund managers. That’s why many investors switch funds – in the assumption that an excellent track record is evidence that strong performance will continue. 

You should care about your funds and their managers. But the reality is that switching funds for better performance is not a slam dunk. In December, Standard and Poor’s released their semi-annual Persistence Scorecard. I hope you will read this report. It may change how you invest, how you select funds, and the reasons why you would switch from one fund to another.

In the Scorecard, S&P analyzes returns of over 2,000 US mutual funds, to determine whether high performing funds continue to have strong performance. They evaluate funds by quartile, with data through September 30, 2018. The top 25% of funds would be called first quartile and the worst 25% of funds would be the fourth quartile.

When you buy a fund in the top quartile, what is the likelihood that it will stay a top performer? Let’s go back to September 2016 and track the 550 domestic equity funds that were in the top 25% for the preceding one-year period. Only 21.09% of the top quartile funds stayed in the top quartile in the next year, ending September 2017. And only 7.09% of the 2016 top quartile funds managed to stay in the top quartile for both 2017 and 2018. Of the funds in the top 25% in 2016, only one in thirteen would stay in the top quarter for the next two years.

When you buy this year’s top funds, it is very unlikely that those funds will continue to be the best performers in the subsequent years. Even though we have all heard that “past performance is no guarantee of future results”, everyone still wants to buy the 5-Star fund, even though all that rating tells us is the fund’s most recent performance!

Perhaps you knew better than to put much weight on one year performance. Still, wouldn’t a good manager be able to create a nice long-term track record? The Scorecard also looks at three and five-year returns.

Let’s consider the five-year data:

We will go back to September 2013 and track the 497 funds which were in the top quartile for five-year performance. How did they do over they following five years, through September 2018?

Only 27.16% would stay in the top quartile for another five years. 21.73% would fall to the second quartile, 20.32% would fall to the third quartile, and 21.13% would end up in the bottom quartile. Additionally, 9.46% of the top funds in 2013 would not even exist five years later. Fund companies merge or liquidate their worst performing funds to make their track records disappear. That’s right, when you go on Morningstar and look up funds, what you see is the result of Survivorship Bias. The record has been cleansed of the worst offenders and you only see the survivors. Thankfully, S&P keeps all data and includes deleted funds in its study.

To me this is another reason to use index funds rather than active managers. There is little evidence that when you pick a top performing manager that he or she will persist as a top performer. In fact, there is about only a one-in-four chance a top fund will remain in the top quartile. That’s pretty much a roll of the dice. Switching from one active manager who is underperforming to another active manager who was recently outperforming is very unlikely to be a successful strategy.

Instead of focusing on manager selection and risk chasing performance, we take a more structured approach:

1. Start with the overall asset allocation. Your weighting of stocks and bonds (60/40, 70/30, 50/50, etc.) is the largest determinant of your portfolio risk and return in the long run.

2. Determine how much you want in each category, such as US Large Cap, US Small Cap, US Value, International, Emerging Markets, etc. We base this on correlation, risk and return profiles, and diversification benefits. Then, we adjust the weightings towards categories which we feel are presently undervalued relative to the others.

3. Choose funds which closely reflect those categories. If you are buying a mid-cap fund, it should act like a mid-cap fund. 

4. Expenses matter. According to research from Morningstar: “the expense ratio is the most proven predictor of future fund returns.” We prefer funds with low expenses so you can keep more of the performance you are buying.

5. While we could use actively managed funds, we like the track record of index ETFs, along with their low cost, tax efficiency, and transparency. They are great building blocks for a portfolio.

Being diversified means owning a broad basket of holdings. This can be frustrating sometimes, wondering why you own A instead of B, when A is down this year and B is up. But putting all your money into whichever category or fund is doing best at any one point in time is not an effective strategy. That’s not just my opinion – look at the data from Standard and Poor’s Persistence Scorecard and I think you will reach the same conclusion. Bet on the market, not the manager.

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