Читать книгу Mutual Funds For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 82

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has an admittedly challenging job. As it’s Chair Gary Gensler said at the Securities Enforcement Forum, “Unfortunately, I’ve learned in my first six months here that there are all too many fraudsters, penny stock scammers, Ponzi scheme architects, and pump-and-dump cons taking advantage of investors. We have to protect the public from as many of these scams as possible. We will continue to pursue misconduct wherever we find it. That will include the hard cases, the novel cases, and, yes, the high-impact cases — whether in special purpose acquisition companies, cyber, crypto, or private funds; whether accounting fraud, insider trading, or recordkeeping violations.”

There’s a lot of money sloshing around out there, and there are so many venues and ways in which hucksters and criminals will try to separate you from your money. Simply put, you should always be extremely careful listening to any recommendations or advice, especially when it’s coming from a source you don’t know well in terms of their expertise, conflicts of interest, and what they are implicitly or explicitly seeking to sell you.

Consider this SEC action against a penny stock schemer on Twitter:

 The Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it filed an emergency action, and obtained an injunction and asset freeze, against Steven M. Gallagher for allegedly committing securities fraud through a long running scheme to manipulate stocks using Twitter.

 The SEC's complaint alleges that, since at least December 2019, Gallagher used his Twitter handle, @AlexDelarge6553, to make thousands of tweets encouraging his numerous followers to buy stocks in which Gallagher had secretly amassed holdings. As alleged, Gallagher would then sell those stocks at inflated prices, while he continued to recommend others buy them — never disclosing that he was selling the stocks.“The complaint alleges that Gallagher used his followers for his own financial gain, tweeting out false advice to pump up the price of stocks he owned, so he could sell for a profit,” said Richard Best, Director of the SEC's New York Regional Office. “This case is a reminder that investors should be wary of taking financial advice from unverified sources on Twitter and other social media platforms.”

As the SEC warns on their website, “… aggressive stock promotion is a red flag of potential fraud.” Indeed it is.

But what about the more believable performance claims, in the range of 20 and 30 percent, that can so easily dupe an investor into thinking they’re true — like the annualized return of 23.4 percent claimed by the Beardstown Ladies?

The Beardstown investment club’s claim of 23.4 percent annualized returns made me suspicious. Stocks historically return just 10 percent per year, yet this club, in its book, was claiming to “have been outperforming mutual funds and professional money managers 3 to 1.” When the club was unwilling to document its performance claims, I assumed they were false.

Turns out its claims were indeed bogus. Shane Tritsch, a reporter for Chicago magazine, wrote a piece titled “Bull Marketing” in which he exposed gross inaccuracies in how the Beardstown investment club calculated its stock market returns. Tritsch was tipped off to potential problems by a note that was added to the copyright page of the paperback edition of the Beardstown book that said that the club’s 23.4 percent annualized returns were determined “by calculating the increase in their total club balance over time. Because this increase includes the dues that the members pay regularly, this return may be different from the return that might be calculated for a mutual fund… .”

May be different? Indeed. Translated, the disclosure was saying that the 23-plus percent returns were being goosed by including new investment principal (regular dues payments). Using documents from the investment club that were provided by a Wall Street Journal reporter, a senior research analyst named Jim Raker, from mutual fund publisher Morningstar, told me that he calculates that the investment club earned a return of a mere 9 percent per year — a far cry from the 23-plus percent returns claimed by the club.

Even worse, though, is that the Beardstown investment club underperformed the market. For the decade in question, while the Beardstown club actually earned just 9 percent per year, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index — the widely followed index for the U.S. stock market — returned about 16 percent. In fact, if you’d invested in lower-risk bonds, you would’ve earned nearly 12 percent per year and still outperformed the stock picks of the Beardstown club!

Whenever an online stock picker, author, investment newsletter, or investment manager claims to have produced a particular rate of return, especially a market-beating return, I always ask for proof before I’m willing to put the claim in print myself. Otherwise, how do I know whether the claims are real or advertising hype?

In addition to claiming high returns, many stock pickers claim that racking up those attractive returns is relatively easy and simple to do. Even former veteran fund manager Peter Lynch claimed, “An amateur who devotes a small amount of study to companies in an industry he or she knows something about can outperform 95 percent of the paid experts who manage mutual funds, plus have fun in doing it.” I would respectfully disagree with the 95 percent aspect and while I agree it can be fun and even educational to pick some of your own stocks, plenty of people find it stressful and emotionally taxing, especially during down periods.

Widely regarded as one of the best mutual fund managers in his day, Lynch knows more than anyone how much hard work goes into beating the market. In fact, during the years that Lynch piloted Fidelity’s Magellan fund, he was known for his workaholic 70- and 80-hour workweeks. He stated publicly that the primary reason he retired early was to spend more time with his family. That leaves everyone else to question: He worked this hard to do something that he says amateurs can do with ease and that you, as an investor, don’t really need his skills for?