Trillade över denna studie häromdagen med denna meningen i sitt abstract:
How is it that the high cost of actively managed mutual funds is not eliminated by competitive forces? How does this clearly inferior product survive?
Bara abstractet är ju spännande:
There is a large financial anomaly hiding in plain sight. In 2021 investors paid almost $90 billion in total fees on about $14 trillion of actively managed mutual funds to an industry flogging a product demonstrably inferior to index funds.
The explanation is both simple and complicated. Simple because a fundamentally unrecognized problem is that open-end mutual funds are organized in a way that makes it functionally impossible to fire the fund sponsor that manages its portfolio.
This, in turn, gives rise to an agency problem exploited by fund sponsors to keep management fees above competitive levels. Congress has recognized that the forces of arm’s length bargaining do not operate on mutual fund fees as they do in other areas of the U.S. economy.
Complicated because the judicial, regulatory, and corporate governance systems have not functioned properly to mitigate the problem. The basic thesis of this paper is at once complicated and radical, i.e., the mutual fund investment management industry has successfully manipulated the political, judicial, regulatory, and corporate governance systems to maintain unreasonably high mutual fund investment management fees.
Finally, where mutual fund fees are concerned, mutual fund independent directors have been accurately characterized by John Bogle as a “bad joke.” Open-end mutual fund investors are overcharged tens of billions of dollars annually in above market management fees on actively managed funds.
Vilken tur att vi inte har dessa problem i Sverige… eller hur var det nu? 
Ytterligare citat från artikeln:
Beginning with Jensen in 19681 and continuing with hundreds of studies over the years it has been well-established that actively managed mutual funds consistently underperform passively managed counterparts over extended periods of time. This contention is not controversial. Moreover, it is also well known that fees are the principal cause of the consistent underperformance, Sharpe,2 Carhart,3 and Fama and French.
Millions of mutual fund investors pay billions of dollars in fees for a product for which there is a clearly superior alternative.
Investors paid about $90 billion in total expenses. Thus, overall investors paid in the neighborhood of 65 basis points annually to an industry selling a demonstrably inferior product.
During 2021, the universe of passively managed open-end funds averaged about $4.7 trillion in assets and investors paid about $3.6 billion or 7.6 basis points in fees. Thus, investors paid more than eight times as much for actively managed funds when there is/was a clearly superior alternative available.
Studies have shown that fund investors are largely ignorant of fees they are charged on mutual funds. As noted in an earlier paper,7 an SEC survey found:
- Only 19% of investors could give an estimate of expenses for their largest mutual fund;8
- Less than half (43%) claimed they knew of the expenses of their largest funds at purchase; and
- Only 16% believed that higher expenses led to lower-than-average returns.9
A third study found that 84% of investors believe that higher operating costs mean better performance.11