The first part of the title of this Macro Letter is borrowed from an excellent book originally written in 1994. Among several observations made by the author, Jeremy Siegel, was the idea that stocks would at least keep pace with GDP growth or even exceed it at the national level. The data, which went back to the 19^th Century, showed that stocks also outperformed bonds in the long-run. The price one has to pay for that outperformance is higher volatility than for bonds and occasional, possibly protracted, periods of under-performance or, if your portfolio is concentrated, the risk of default. This is not to say that bonds are exempt from default risk, notwithstanding the term ‘risk-free rate’ which we associate with many government obligations. A diversified portfolio of stocks (and bonds) has been seen as the ideal investment approach ever since Markowitz promulgated the concept of modern portfolio theory.

Today, passive index tracking funds have swallowed a massive percentage of all the investment which flows into the stock market. Why? Because robust empirical data shows that it is almost impossible for active portfolio managers to consistently outperform their benchmark index in the long run once their higher fees have been factored in.

An interesting way of showing how indexation has propelled the stock market higher recently, regardless of valuation, is shown in this chart from Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory – Three Body Problem. He uses it to show how the factor which is QE has trumped everything in its wake. I’ll allow Ben to explain:-

Here’s the impact of all that gravity on the Quality-of-Companies derivative investment strategy.

The green line below is the S&P 500 index. The white line below is a Quality Index sponsored by Deutsche Bank. They look at 1,000 global large cap companies and evaluate them for return on equity, return on invested capital, and accounting accruals … quantifiable proxies for the most common ways that investors think about quality. Because the goal is to isolate the Quality factor, the index is long in equal amounts the top 20% of measuredcompanies and short the bottom 20% (so market neutral), and has equal amounts invested long and short in the component sectors of the market (so sector neutral). The chart begins on March 9, 2009, when the Fed launched its first QE program.

Source: Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank

Over the past eight and a half years, Quality has been absolutely useless as an investment derivative. You’ve made a grand total of not quite 3% on your investment, while the S&P 500 is up almost 300%.