EVEN THE BEST STRUGGLE...

From time to time we like to keep track of the investment performance of our old associate, Lew Sanders.  This has academic interest to me since he truly is a real smart guy,.  If man with his brains can't outperform the S & P 500, it speaks volumes as to the difficulty of the "Average Joe" trying to outperform the market.

The only real access we have to his portfolio performance is a website called Tickerspy which aggregates the portfolio holdings of investment firms based upon SEC filings. Sanders Capital, his recently formed investment firm, seems to have been under performing the market averages in most time frames that I can find reported on the Tickerspy website.

For example, figures on Tickerspy show that the S & P 500 return is approximately down 3% for the last three months, while the Sanders portfolio seems to be reported down 8%.

For the latest 6 month period the S & P 500 shows a return of about 12 1/2 %, while the Sanders portfolio shows a return of about 3 to 4 %.

If these figures are close to  correct, they don't say much during this short time frame for the value added by the Sanders Capital group.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as value investing and since Lew is as good as it gets, in terms of academic knowledge, indexing is still alive and kicking.