Here is an astonishing fact brought to my attention from the quant group at Merrill:
“In 2012, 39% of managers beat the S&P 500. Value and Core managers achieved 21% and 38% success rates, respectively. 54% of Growth managers outperformed the benchmark.”
38% is an unusual data point — Value did not work, Core did not work, tactical did not work — it was Growth, especially Tech, that did best to the current environment. How much of this was Apple (AAPL) related I am unsure.
Whether you want to credit (or blame) the Fed or the economy, it was an odd year. (I’ll check with Savita to see exactly how much of an outlier it actually was relative to their historical database).
Update: Over the last 10 yrs, the percentage of managers in the Merrill data that beats their benchmark is about ~48%.
Source:
A good year f or equities, so why did it feel so bad?
Savita Subramanian
Bank of America Merrill Lynch, January, 06 2013
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