Charles Ellis is among the greatest investors of the 20th century and author of the perennial investment classic Winning the Loser’s Game.
He was associated with the giant Yale Endowment Fund and his firm Greenwich Associates is an advisor to giant institutional investors.
In Winning the Loser’s Game he poses a question...what would an investor’s dream team comprise of?
In other words if a typical investor was given a choice of choosing his ‘dream team’ to manage money-who would he select? Which individuals would he choose to manage his money?
Ellis goes on to answer the question...the team would clearly comprise of Warren Buffett-his partner Charlie Munger, Peter Lynch and George Soros...these guys are obvious choices! It’s a no-brainier.
Further says Ellis-the investor’s dream team would also comprise of all the hedge fund managers-since they too have expertise, insights, knowledge and information...Ellis doesn’t stop...he says why not even have all the best analysts from the best Wall Street banks, from all those brokerages and all those research outfits...!
In short...a typical dream team would certainly comprise of all the finest professionals in the business-if we as investors had a choice wouldn’t we want such a ‘star-studded’ team manage our money? And what if we could hire all of them at a low cost?
Let me reproduce the sage advice of Charles Ellis-how each and every investor can permanently have a dream team comprising of the best professionals work for him !
In fact, you can have all the best professionals working for you all the time. All you have to do us agree to accept all their best thinking without asking questions. (Most of us do the same sort of thing every time we fly: We know that our pilots are trained for and committed to safety. Boring as it may seem, we relax in our seats and leave the flying to the experts.)
To get the combined expertise of all these top professionals, all you do is index-because an index fund replicates the market, and today’s professional-dominated stock market reflects all the accumulated expertise of all those diligent experts making their best current judgments all the time.
And as they learn more, they will quickly update their judgment, which means that you will always have the most up-to-date consensus when you index.
...the ‘market portfolio’ or index fund is actually the result of all the hard work being done every day by the investor’s dream team.
Passive or index investing is seldom given anything like the respect it deserves. But it will, over time, achieve better results than most mutual funds-and far better results than most individual investors achieve.
Conceptually, the timeless and seminal advice of Charles Ellis is also applicable to Indian investors...it always was, it is right now and will be applicable till eternity!
Indian investors can buy cap-weighted broad market index funds / ETFs-including (cap-weighted) Total Market Index fund-they are akin to buying the market or the combined expertise of all professional active managers who participate in Indian markets.
A short list would include all MF managers, insurance managers, all PMS Managers, treasuries managers-corporate & bank, all analysts, all institutional investors, broker-advisors, family offices and so on and so forth.
The combined expertise / thinking of all professionals, at any given point in time, is reflected in the market prices-and therefore in the market capitalization of individual companies...therefore when an investor buys broad market cap-weighted index funds / ETFs he is in effect hiring the combined expertise of all professionals (at a very low cost)-the proverbial ‘dream team.’
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