SUMMARY
The Fleeting Alpha Scorecard combines elements of the SPIVA® U.S. Scorecard and the Persistence Scorecard to show how outperforming mutual funds from one three-year period continue to perform thereafter. The former report compares actively managed funds against their passive benchmarks, while the latter compares funds against their peers.
For the Fleeting Alpha Scorecard, we first identify funds that beat their benchmarks, based on three-year annualized returns, net-of-fees. We then examine whether these funds continue to outperform during each of the next three one-year periods.
There was significant dispersion in the likelihood of funds outperforming by category, with the most notable split occuring between growth and value funds. For example, as of Dec. 31, 2017, 84 of the 261 large-cap growth funds had outperformed the S&P 500® Growth in the previous three years. Of those winners, 21 (or 25%) outperformed for the subsequent three years. But on the value side, while 78 out of 338 funds had outperformed the S&P 500® Value as of Dec. 31, 2017, only 1 of those winners managed to continue outperforming annually through 2020 (see Exhibit 1 and Report 1).
In 4 of the 18 domestic equity categories tracked, no funds managed to repeat their outperformance, and fewer than 10% did so in an additional four categories (see Report 1).
Echoing a point from the SPIVA U.S. Year-End 2020 Scorecard, prior to the evaluation of alpha persistence, few funds beat the benchmark for the initial three years (2015-2017). In 13 of the 18 domestic equity categories, fewer than 20% surpassed the benchmark, significantly reducing the original universe into the pool of "winners" for subsequent tracking.
International equity funds had slightly higher rates of outperformance in the initial period and were more stable in their alpha maintenance across categories and time. The conspicuous exception was emerging market funds where no active manager managed to repeat their positive alpha through 2020.
We take into consideration that cyclical market conditions can unduly influence a snapshot of the performance persistence figure. The figures in Report 2 are calculated by: 1) creating a version of Report 1 for each quarter between December 2011 and December 2020, and 2) taking simple averages of the persistence figures for each of the categories.
This analysis showed that the average outperformance persistence in each of the subsequent three years fell rapidly. Across all funds in the tracking universe, the average outperformance persistence by year was 33.8%, 13.7%, and 6.7%, respectively.
The growth/value split was visible in this longer timeframe as well. As Exhibit 2 shows, while the percentage of outperforming value funds was reasonably similar to their growth counterparts in year one, their alpha proved substantially less durable, suffering a harsher decline by year three.
