If you don’t handle your retirement, he might do it for you. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?

You can do this.

Fund managers have to be conservative, by definition. Even the smallest fund has tens of millions of OPM (Other people’s money. What are you, 80?) under its control. A fund manager has far less margin for error than does a private investor, at least professionally. If you maintain your own portfolio, and it loses 40% of its value in a given year, that’ll affect you and a handful of others. Do so as a fund manager, and your career will be dead on impact. (Actually, that’s not true. You’d be fired way before you lost 40%.) Imagine the looks of horror and sotto voce comments at the Wharton class of ’07 reunion. (And yes, plenty of fund managers are indeed that young.) You wouldn’t dare show your face. “Is that Spencer? Wasn’t he on the fast track at Vanguard? I heard he’s working in the suburbs now. Had to cut his cocaine use back to weekends only. Poor bastard.”

Fund management, for the most part, is regression to the mean. The same funds hold the same damn stocks, over and over again. Some funds are required to hold the stocks of companies that have reached a certain size. Make the Wilshire 5000, and that automatically qualifies you to be in somebody’s fund. Join the Dow (and someone soon will, to replace recently departed Kraft), and the same thing happens.

This is perverse. The tail is wagging the dog, for lack of a more original phrase. A fund doesn’t take on a new component because the fund manager sees something he likes and discreetly buys a position before someone else can. Funds take on new components because they have to. Or because everyone else is doing it.

Furthermore, fund managers aren’t just sheep. By and large, they’re hypocrites and liars. (Yes, we know. Welcome to the human species.)

Joe Light recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Facebook didn’t just seduce ordinary investors suffering from Streisand Syndrome. The professionals got sucked in, too. Big names. Fidelity. JPMorgan. The most successful website since Google (by number of users, anyway) went public, and did so in at least a couple of senses of the phrase. Everyone was talking about it and familiar with the story of its origin (thanks to a timely and critically acclaimed big-budget movie), and few institutional investors had the fortitude to say “no”. Or even say, “Can we take a look at the company’s financials?”

160 mutual funds bought Facebook. These included Fidelity’s Dividend Growth Fund.

Read that last sentence again. Facebook doesn’t pay a dividend.

The JPMorgan Intrepid Value Fund presumably invests in value stocks. An unproven IPO (that ended up losing 1/3 of its market cap out of the gate) doesn’t fit anyone’s definition of a “value” stock.

The managers of these funds didn’t answer the allegations of impropriety. Neither did any company spokespeople. And for the sake of consistency, we’ll end this paragraph in italics, too.

So why the hell were these funds, with their objectives included in their titles, buying a stock that had nothing to do with those objectives?

Again, defense. Say Facebook did what its devotees wanted, and exploded out of the gate. The punishment, professional and otherwise, for being the manager who could’ve bought Facebook but didn’t is overwhelming.

You can complain about how the financiers are screwing the little guy, Wall Street over Main Street, etc. if it makes you feel good. Or you can go David and aim for their heads.

Being small and nimble, i.e. an individual investor, gives you advantages that no fund manager can ever enjoy. Why?

• You don’t have to answer to anyone.

• You can take calculated, intelligent risks. Ones where you’ve weighed the potential downside and have decided you can live with it. Professional fund managers can do that too, to some extent, but when they do it it’s no bold move. It’s a piddling activity whose downside is mitigated by there being so many components to their funds. Hundreds of funds owned General Motors stock when it got delisted and the company eventually went bankrupt. No manager who bought GM lost his job, at least not for buying GM.

• Your objectives are clearer. You’re there to make money. To maximize return by finding value and exploiting it.
  Is a fund manager there to make money? Yes, but not as unambiguously as you are. A fund manager makes a cut, yes, and also makes a salary. Thanks to that salary, the fund manager is operating under the same directive that most people do – I must preserve my job at all costs. The higher the salary, the more tightly someone will hold onto that job and the less they’ll to do risk getting fired. Playing not to lose isn’t just acceptable, from a fund manager’s perspective, it’s good business sense. At least as far as longevity is concerned.

Yes, selecting investments (it’s not “picking stocks”, thank you very much) is hard. It’s not an intellectual exercise along the lines of solving one of Hilbert’s Problems, but it’s hard in that it requires discipline. The same intestinal fortitude that gets your heart in shape or your lungs tobacco-free, can get you rich. Here’s how to start.