Mutual Funds Pick Year When S&P 500 Is Up 1% To Beat The Market

Good news for investors: Far more mutual funds are beating the market than last year. The bad news is that stocks are returning one-tenth as much.

According to a Fundstrat Global Advisors LLC survey of 3,265 funds, more than half posted gains that exceeded benchmark indexes in 2015 through March 6, for their best start to a year since 2012. Managers are finding it easier to profit from stock- picking as lockstep moves among shares unwind and the market endures swings not seen since 2011.

“Factors aiding active manager performance are improving in 2015, suggesting the positive start for funds will continue,” Thomas J. Lee, managing partner and co-founder of Fundstrat, wrote in a note Monday. “We could potentially be returning to the early ’90s and 2000 to 2007 eras, when active managers routinely beat their benchmark.”

Whether anyone will care is another question. While volatility has been good for active managers, so far it isn’t doing much for the bottom line. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, up 1.1 percent this year after rising 44 percent the previous two, is poised for its worst first quarter since 2009. Investors pulled more than $10 billion out of mutual and exchange-traded U.S. equity funds in January and February, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Investment Company Institute.

“Benchmarks matter to institutions, like school endowments competing against each other,” Matt Maley, an equity strategist at Miller Tabak & Co LLC in Newton, Massachusetts, said by phone. “People are not competing against anyone else. They just want to make money. That’s how mutual fund investors are.”

Moving Individually

Managers’ outperformances this year could be tied to stocks’ inclinations to move independently of each other, according to Lee. The Chicago Board Options Exchange’s S&P 500 Implied Correlation Index, which uses options to measure expectations about whether stocks will move in unison, plunged 17 percent this year through March 5, to the lowest level since 2012.

Funds that outperformed in January and February benefited from underweighting shares of utilities and financials, Lee wrote. These S&P 500 groups lost at least 1.7 percent in the first two months of 2015 as the broader index rose 2.2 percent.

Last year, only 25 percent of actively managed equity mutual funds beat their benchmarks, the lowest rate since 1995, according to data from Morningstar. The S&P 500 climbed 11 percent in 2014.