Register For Our Mailing List

Register to receive our free weekly newsletter including editorials.

Home / 453

Track if your fund manager is taking the best shot

After an extraordinary career guiding Amazon to the peak of global retailing, former CEO Jeff Bezos delivered a final message in 2021 that was “of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach”. He wanted all his staff and shareholders to “take it to heart”.

It contains relevance for fund managers about distinctiveness and keeping alive the skills and risk appetite that make them special. Both retail and professional investors should also take it to heart when talking to the people who look after their money.

Focus more on tracking error

Most asset managers conduct public-access webinars or events, including Q&A sessions, while a more privileged, one-on-one contact is granted to professional analysts. It’s a time to learn how fund managers construct their portfolios.

While every meeting, public or private, features fund performance and macro trends, analysts delve more into specific measurement metrics. Some of the numbers, such as the Sharpe Ratio or Information Ratio (and heaven help us, kurtosis and skewness) may seem a little arcane, but tracking error is easy to understand, yet it is rarely discussed in retail presentations.

It’s a useful concept which deserves a regular check. Put simply, tracking error shows how closely an active portfolio follows its benchmark index. It measures the active risk due to decisions made by the portfolio manager. It should not be called an 'error', as it should be the result of a conscious action.

For a cap-weighted index fund, such as an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) designed to follow a standard index, the tracking error should be as low as possible. A competent index provider should have processes which ensure index replication wherever possible. For example, the five-year tracking error for the Vanguard Australia Share Index Fund is a low 0.43% but it is 4.32% for the Vanguard Australia Shares High Yield Fund. The latter is not trying to track the broad index.

For active managers, a low tracking error should be the kiss of death. They should be having a crack - or if you prefer, swinging the bat or giving it their best shot - weighting and selecting stocks away from the index. Nobody should pay high active fees for a low tracking error fund.

For an active fund, what’s the right number?

Jeff Bezos’s final letter to Amazon shareholders

Let’s digress before returning to that question.

Jeff Bezos's business acumen changed the face of retailing around the world and created a company by the end of 2020 with 1.3 million employees, 200 million Prime members, 2 million small and medium-sized businesses selling in their store and wealth creation of almost US$2 trillion. He wrote his first letter to shareholders in 1997, and his final in 2021 when he left as CEO.

Here is a long quote from Bezos’s final letter:

“This is my last annual shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon, and I have one last thing of utmost importance I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians take it to heart.

Here is a passage from Richard Dawkins' (extraordinary) book The Blind Watchmaker. It's about a basic fact of biology.

"Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die." ...

We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to "be yourself." What I'm really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don't let it happen.

You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it's worth it. The fairy tale version of "be yourself" is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don't expect it to be easy or free. You'll have to put energy into it continuously." (my bolding)

It’s the same for active fund managers

Investors should apply the same principles to their active fund managers. Any with low tracking errors of 1% or 2% are replicating their surroundings, and to use the Dawkins analysis, their funds deserve to die. That is not what they are paid to do. They should take a view that differs from the market, or they should pack up and save their clients the active fees.

The problem is often acute in large funds where, having spent years building a business and collecting loyal clients, the temptation is to remove the business risk of underperformance. Some large funds have small tracking errors, where the fund managers have decided there is career risk in losing money and index returns are sufficient. Management has decided, to use Bezos’s words, “to bring us into equilibrium with our environment.”

Funds industry veteran, Chris Cuffe, wrote in this article:

“It’s astounding in Australia the number of managers who won’t risk being too different from the index. If they underperform for a short period due to departure from the index, they worry they will lose funds (and maybe their job will go as well).

I listened to an active Australian equity manager tell me how proud he was of being index-unaware, yet his exposure to financials was 27%, not the 30% per the index. This is not an active position at all and he is surely being driven by the index. I would think that a position of half or double or nil is more like an active view.

The best investors I deal with are totally benchmark unaware, even as to what markets they invest into, local or overseas or cash or whatever.

The lack of willingness to be different from a benchmark has a lot to answer for in encouraging mediocre investing across the world. The dominance of these behaviours is far greater than anyone will admit. It drives many professionals to bizarre investing.”

What is a reasonable tracking error for an active fund?

Tracking error is a measure of how actively a fund is managed. It is calculated as the standard deviation of the difference between the returns of the portfolio and the returns of the benchmark.

The index might be considered the neutral starting point for portfolio construction, and the tracking error informs the investor what to expect in variations from the benchmark. It’s also an explanation of a fund’s volatility not caused by market beta.

An active manager should accept a tracking error of at least 5% and 10% is considered normal. According to Fidelity, the tracking error of the median fund using the US S&P500 as a benchmark is 9.1%. A number such as 20% or 30% is expected from a manager taking strong bets in a concentrated portfolio.

Jose Garcia Zarate, Associate Director of Passive Strategies at Morningstar, writes:

“A useful analogy to understand these concepts is that of a race between two cars, where one car is the index and the other is the fund. Tracking Error tells you how close the two cars were to each other during the race.”

He gives the following example to calculate the tracking error:

  • Tracking Error = Standard Deviation of (P–B)
  • P = the return of the investment
  • B = the return of the benchmark

Assume there is a fund benchmarked to the ASX200 index with fund and index returns as follows over a five-year period:

Fund Return (P)

ASX200 Return (B)

Series of Differences (P-B)

% Differences

11%

12%

(11-12)%

-1%

3%

5%

(3-5)%

-2%

12%

13%

(12-13)%

-1%

14%

9%

(14-9)%

+5%

8%

7%

(8-7)%

+1%

The standard deviation of this series of differences, the tracking error, is 2.8%. If the sequence of return differences is normally distributed, it can be expected that the fund will return within 2.8%, plus or minus, of its benchmark approximately every two years out of three. This manager is a benchmark hugger.

Investors should also expect a fund with less volatile investments, such as bonds and loans rather than equities, to have a lower tracking error. 

Here is a sample of active equity fund tracking errors. Measuring over time may show whether the manager is changing active bets.

Tracking errors of selected Australian funds over different time periods

Fund (ASX code where relevant) 1 year (%) 5 year (%)
ETFs    
VanEck Aust Equal Weighted (MVW) 3.46 3.54
Vanguard Aust Shares High Yield (VHY) 5.99 4.32
BetaShares Dividend Harvester (HVST) 4.06 8.71
LICs/LITs    
AFIC (AFI) 4.74 2.90
Argo (ARG) 4.48 2.74
Cadence (CDM) 19.41 12.68
Djerriwarrh (DJW) 5.60 3.62
Forager (FOR) 13.25 14.85
Ophir High Conviction (OPH) 21.65 na
Pengana International (PIA) 9.28 9.46
Perpetual Equity (PIC) 13.88 10.12
Platinum Capital (PMC) 13.58 9.93
QV Equities (QVE) 9.18 8.72
VGI Global (VG1) 9.89 na
WAM Capital (WAM) 6.40 6.37
Managed Funds    
Magellan Global Open 4.29 6.58
Magellan High Conviction 9.36 9.04
Pendal Aust Shares 9.64 14.48
First Sentier Equity Income 9.44 12.38
MFS Global Equity 11.59 11.67
Tribeca Global Resources 17.36 23.66
Fidelity Australian Equity 12.98 14.71
Australian Ethical Aust Shares 13.44 15.49
Orbis Emerging Markets 11.69 12.78
Montaka Global Long Only 18.87 14.54
Plato Australian Shares Income 11.11 14.44

Source: Morningstar Direct database, benchmarks vary by fund.

As investors should hope and expect, some of the smaller boutiques such as Montaka, Tribeca Resources, Ophir, Forager and Cadence are having a good go. Their clients should appreciate that there will be significant divergence from the benchmark, as they are high conviction managers. The long-established LICs such as AFIC and Argo are closer to their benchmarks, but also cheaper and safe and reliable options. The big active managers tend to sit somewhere between, but names such as Fidelity and Australian Ethical are taking decent bets. 

In summary, individuals select active fund managers to outperform, and that is only possible if positions are taken away from the index. A tracking error of 1% cannot achieve much, and it’s not worth paying active fees.

But don't complain if a boutique fund manager with a high tracking error delivers a bad year. It is an inevitable part of diverging from safety. 

Next time you are at a presentation, ask about the fund’s index and the tracking error. If it’s not at least 5%, ask why the manager is not having a decent go. If it’s over 15%, expect wide variations but at least you know what you’re paying for.

Final words from Bezos

If Jeff Bezos had gone into funds management, you can be sure there would be high tracking errors and no index hugging, but he goes much broader than that. He implores all of us to be distinctive.

“I would argue that it's relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual lives too. In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special?”

 

Graham Hand is Editor-at-Large for Firstlinks. This article is general information and does not consider the circumstances of any investor.

 

15 Comments
Graham Wright
April 09, 2022

The two most important factors in investing are the returns you get and the trust you have in yourself or your investment managers/advisors to get those returns. These are absolute values so comparison mathematics have no value to you. Who should care if you or those supporting you are better than others? And who should you outperform anyway?
Risks are the most significant factor to be managed. Do you or your managers/advisors have the skills and expertise to manage the risks involved. The costs (fees) matter little if the risks are well managed and the absolute returns reward you for the risks taken.

Steve
April 07, 2022

I believe it has been shown by the Vanguards of the world that the vast majority of active managers fail to beat their index over any "investment" timeframe (that is 5+ years). There are two basic sources of outperformance; quantitative where the managers model looks for under-priced shares based on their preferred metrics (P/E, ROE etc). As most have had the same formal training these metrics are probably similar between funds, so hard to stand out. The other could be called qualitative where the fund manager looks for more variables to gauge the likelihood of success (eg hot sector, "quality" of management, novelty of offering (ie moats) etc.) To succeed here you have to be smarter (or luckier) than everyone else, most of the time. Hard to sustain. The other factor I think is a key is the concept of "skewness" where the vast bulk of the gains for an index such as the S&P500 is driven by totally disproportionate gains by a tiny fraction of the stocks - the vast majority flatline or go backwards over an extended period of time due to capitalism/competition doing its destructive magic. So if you don't pick the very small subset of "winners" at the start you are stuffed - and here's the trick - the indexes (whichever ones they are) by default have all the winners! And all the losers/plodders as well, but a few 1000% winners makes up for a large number of plodders. That is skewness. In the world of tech there are literally thousands of potential winners. Who had a portfolio loaded up with the FAANGS 15 years ago? Or did they have America Online, Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, General Electric et al? Who will be the winners 20 years from now? All I now is the indexes will hold them, no idea how next years fund managers will go.

Luke
April 07, 2022

Great tracking error article. Nice analogies and making the concept accessible to all investors.

CC
April 06, 2022

if you want divergence from the index and a better chance of outperformance with an equity fund in Australia you are usually better off using Small caps funds run by boutique managers

Greg
April 06, 2022

Thanks Graham for a most insightful article,

With an interest in LICs and LITS, I am of the view that change in NTA, along with dividends paid, is what I should be looking at to assess LIC Manager performance.

To mention two large LICs from the table above, both ARG and AFI are trading at prices with close to record premiums to NTA at the moment so any calculation of their “price” performance is distorted in a positive way against performance calculated on changes in NTA.

Can you clarify, please, whether the underlying data provided by Morningstar for LICs allows for dividends paid and whether returns are based on changes in price or changes in NTA please ?

john
April 06, 2022

The criteria suggested for a good active fund manager is a high tracking error.

However, a fund manager that is absolutely poor at picking investments will have a huge tracking error. Consider, the poor fund manager that always gets it wrong. He will always be a long way from the index, and as such produce a high standard deviation from that index, so will have a big tracking error.

But that isn't a good thing, because he is under performing.

So, if you are seeking a good active fund manager, you need to consider his performance (ie usually out performs the index) and at the same time, has a significant tracking error (to demonstrate he is willing to stand by his decisions.

For an active fund manger, both are desirable, not just a high tracking error

Greg
April 06, 2022

This comment is no longer available.

Chris
April 06, 2022

Let's hope the YourFuture, YourSuper rules that came into effect mid 2021 don't force one of the world's largest savings pools (the Australian Super industry) to become index huggers by disincentivising super funds from having a high tracking error...there will be no Amazons, only Wal Marts in that case.

Jerome Lander
April 06, 2022

Tracking error is not something that truly active fund managers even consider. As touched on the most active managers often don't restrict themselves to investing only in equities, but use a multi-asset class and multi-strategy approach as that is part of what's required to optimise the resilience and client alignment of a portfolio. It is how many conservative investors wanting a more balanced solution or investing all of their money would invest. Clients don't really want managers to beat an equities benchmark that doesn't matter to them, nor should they. Instead they often want an outcomes based absolute return solution with low downside risk. Funnily enough, such a portfolio can actually beat an equities benchmark anyway over time because avoiding big downside massively boosts long term returns compared with taking big losses in a riskier portfolio.

Graham Hand
April 06, 2022

Hi Jerome, take your point on multi-asset and multi-strategy managers but this article focusses on active equity manager selection and monitoring.

NR
April 06, 2022

Maybe this reponse would be better served in a discussion on multi asset asset investing. An active equity fund won’t invest in assets other than equities. 

Lanky
April 09, 2022

Thanks for yet another insightful article, Graham!

Jerome, I agree that active managers shouldn’t necessarily be fixated on indices, however ultimately their returns may be compared to them.

Over periods of say 5-10 years or more, performance needs to be compared against something, whether it’s an absolute return figure or the various alternative indices that are available.

Ideally they’re going for the best opportunities they can find irrespective of whether they correlate with an index or not, and also it’s possible that the overlap may vary over time.

Individual investors might require benchmarking for reasons relating to portfolio balancing.

Some funds might be using an index as a reference point or yardstick against which to contrast the anticipated risk return profile of their proposed investments while others may be relatively agnostic, simply focusing on finding the best opportunities.

There’s probably something in considering a tracking of at least 5-10% as one factor amongst multitude of others; obviously as was alluded to, an enormous divergence could be associated either with vast outperformance or underperformance. However a manager claiming to be active yet having a low correlation of say less than 5% consistently might deserve greater skepticism.

Chris
April 06, 2022

As a professional allocator to funds, I always ask about tracking error. A low number is a deal breaker if I'm looking for an active fund. I don't think there is any number too high. An extremely high tracking error often comes with great returns, but just not necessarily smoothly.

AO
April 06, 2022

I also want to know the ‘Information ratio’ – it reveals the meaningful ‘information’ that is important – the tracking error relative to the excess returns generated.

AI
April 06, 2022

Absolutely right: focusing on tracking error only looks at half of the equation. You can have a high TE and terrible alpha. Good equity investors can take moderate risk and still get good alpha, thereby providing a more reliable outcome and saving their investors a lot of stress

 

Leave a Comment:


RELATED ARTICLES

Are markets broken?

History suggests the Magnificent Seven are headed for a fall

Why good active managers should outperform

banner

Most viewed in recent weeks

The nuts and bolts of family trusts

There are well over 800,000 family trusts in Australia, controlling more than $3 trillion of assets. Here's a guide on whether a family trust may have a place in your individual investment strategy.

Welcome to Firstlinks Edition 581 with weekend update

A recent industry event made me realise that a 30 year old investing trend could still have serious legs. Could it eventually pose a threat to two of Australia's biggest companies?

  • 10 October 2024

Preserving wealth through generations is hard

How have so many wealthy families through history managed to squander their fortunes? This looks at the lessons from these families and offers several solutions to making and keeping money over the long-term.

Welcome to Firstlinks Edition 583

Investing guru Howard Marks says he had two epiphanies while visiting Australia recently: the two major asset classes aren’t what you think they are, and one key decision matters above all else when building portfolios.

  • 24 October 2024

A big win for bank customers against scammers

A recent ruling from The Australian Financial Complaints Authority may herald a new era for financial scams. For the first time, a bank is being forced to reimburse a customer for the amount they were scammed.

The quirks of retirement planning with an age gap

A big age gap can make it harder to find a solution that works for both partners – financially and otherwise. Having a frank conversation about the future, and having it as early as possible, is essential.

Latest Updates

Planning

What will be your legacy?

As we get older, many of us start to think about how we’ll be remembered by those left behind. This looks at why that may not be the best strategy to ensure that you live life well and leave loved ones in good stead.

Economy

It's the cost of government, stupid

Australia's bloated government sector is every bit as responsible for our economic worries as the cost of living crisis. Grand schemes like the 'Future Made in Australia' only look set to make it worse.

SMSF strategies

A guide to valuing SMSF assets correctly

SMSF trustees are required to value all fund assets, including property, at market value when preparing the fund's financial statements each year. Here are some key tips to ensure that you get it right.

Economics

Australia is lucky the British were the first 'intruders'

British colonisation's Common Law system contributed to economic prosperity, in contrast to Latin America's lower wealth under Civil Law. It influenced capitalism's success in former British colonies, like Australia.

Economics

A significant shift in the jobs market

The expansion of the 'care sector' represents the most profound structural change to Australia's job market since the mining boom. This analyses how it's come about and the impact it will have on the economy.

Shares

Searching for value in tech stocks

Just because a stock is cheap doesn't necessarily make it good value. This uses case studies in the tech sector to help identify when stocks trading on 30x earnings may be inexpensive and when others on 10x may be value traps.

Investing

Are more informed investors prone to making poorer decisions?

Finance Professor Michael Finke recently discussed the double-edged sword of taking an interest in your investments, three predictors of panic selling, and why nurses tend to be better investors than doctors.

Sponsors

Alliances

© 2024 Morningstar, Inc. All rights reserved.

Disclaimer
The data, research and opinions provided here are for information purposes; are not an offer to buy or sell a security; and are not warranted to be correct, complete or accurate. Morningstar, its affiliates, and third-party content providers are not responsible for any investment decisions, damages or losses resulting from, or related to, the data and analyses or their use. To the extent any content is general advice, it has been prepared for clients of Morningstar Australasia Pty Ltd (ABN: 95 090 665 544, AFSL: 240892), without reference to your financial objectives, situation or needs. For more information refer to our Financial Services Guide. You should consider the advice in light of these matters and if applicable, the relevant Product Disclosure Statement before making any decision to invest. Past performance does not necessarily indicate a financial product’s future performance. To obtain advice tailored to your situation, contact a professional financial adviser. Articles are current as at date of publication.
This website contains information and opinions provided by third parties. Inclusion of this information does not necessarily represent Morningstar’s positions, strategies or opinions and should not be considered an endorsement by Morningstar.