2019 Results: Who Beat the Market?
For those of you that are new subscribers and might not know this, each year I compile the statistics of all of the TSP Allocation Services that I know about. What’s a TSP Allocation Service, you ask? Those aspiring market-beaters, who send out occasional emails telling you to move your TSP from the G Fund to the C Fund. Or to go 30% C, 40% F, 30%. You know, something along those lines. Some of them are free, some charge a few hundred dollars for their services.
I have been keeping stats of their performance for years. As far as I know, I’m the only one out there doing it. It’s a long-term, real-time study of how these market timers perform when compared to the various TSP Funds. I also include the websites of the various services in case you want to go investigate them yourself. You will quickly see some websites are polished and easily navigated, while others are literally partying like it’s 1999, AOL-bulletin board style. Some publish their returns, and some do not. Hard to evaluate one that does not say how it performed in previous years, so you will see I don’t have hard data on those.
I sometimes step on people’s toes with this article, but I’m here to provide you truth, not validation.
Cut right to the chase? Ok, the 2019 TSP Allocation Service Trophy goes to……The C Fund. Yep, that’s right. Not one of these services (even the ones that charge a lot of money), were able to beat just the old buy-and-hold strategy of the C Fund. In other words, no one successfully timed the market in 2019.
SOME INSTRUCTIONS TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND JUST WHAT THE HECK YOU’RE LOOKING AT
Spreadsheet. At the bottom of this article is the document I update each year. Click the button and you can download the PDF yourself to study it. The first page lays out all of the services, their website, how much they cost, and maybe a note or two. The second page is the spreadsheet containing the actual results. The yellow highlighted cells indicate the winner for that year. The returns for each service, and each TSP Fund, are listed going back to 2007. You will also see a column that shows what $10,000 invested in 2007 would have grown to by the end of 2019. BE CAREFUL THOUGH—some of those returns aren’t real.
“Wait. Aren’t real? What’s that mean?!” Welcome to the world of backtesting…
Backtesting. This is a very important concept to grasp. Essentially it works like this: The service did not exist over the last 10 years, but IF IT HAD, the return using their system would have been, whatever, say 10% a year. The problem with this is that it’s not a real return. It didn’t really happen. Here’s a real example. Look at TSP Timing. Its numbers show that it CRUSHED the market over the long run, particularly in 2008 and 2015. The problem with this? The system didn’t actually EXIST prior to 2016. They started their system in 2016, and then tested their theory back to 2007, hence the term. In other words, you might see some returns on the list that aren’t real—they are theoretical returns. The problem with theoretical returns is that they produce only theoretical money, and from my experience, that’s pretty hard to spend.
Since TSP Timing has existed since 2016, it has returned at total of 58%. The C Fund has returned a total of 72% over that same time period. Those are real returns compared to real returns. In fact, since 2016, NONE of the services have beaten the C Fund’s average. So, please don’t just instantly see these large returns and blindly accept them as fact. It often seems that a timing service does much better during the imaginary phase, than in the real-world phase.
I Fund. I get questioned about this all the time. I make no bones about my disdain for the I Fund. I am not against international funds, I am against THIS international fund. It’s performance has been terrible. Outside of the G Fund, it comes in last place over the last 13 years. And it just barely beat the G Fund! Keep in mind the G Fund is guaranteed, the I Fund is not only not guaranteed, but very volatile. Now, having said that, you will see on the chart that the I Fund beat all fund and all allocation services in 2017. But that was the only year it did. Over the long run, it has underperformed. In fact, you can see it was the worst fund on the entire page for the years 2008, 2011, and 2014.
Some of you may have read that complaints about the I Fund have been acknowledged by the TSP Board. They are planning on switching to a different I Fund that will include other countries who’s markets are actually growing, something this I Fund has missed out on for well over a decade. There are some problems, however. The new I Fund wants to invest in China. Different parts of the US Government strongly oppose this plan, and are introducing bills to stop this. All of this turmoil is delaying the rollout of the new I Fund. The Coronavirus certainly didn’t help the case for the pro “Invest in China” crowd.
Now you know some interesting information to share with a coworker you want to bore enough to leave you alone, “Uhh, it’s a little known fact, Fred, the Thrift Savings Board is re-indexing the I Fund due to the underperforming nature of the world economies in which it is most heavily weighted” (Most effective when performed in your best Cliff Claven voice).
CAGR. Don’t get too confused or worried about what this means. It is simply the annual growth rate of the investment, compounded. Like, when someone says that the stock market has returned 8% over the last decade, this is the number that they are using. It is better than a regular average, because it reflects the true growth—the compounding growth. If you want to learn more about this, you can read my novel TSP Timing, available at FERSGUIDE or I can email it to you. (For you serious financial nerds, the CAGR is the geometric mean, as opposed to the arithmetic mean.)
What I Do. I deal with this question every year, so I address it up front. I do not use any of these services. I am not opposed to them philosophically or anything, I just don’t see one that can clearly beat the market. Readers of my newsletters know I do not believe anyone can time the market consistently enough to beat it. None of these services’ performance does anything to change that belief. In fact, not one single one beat the C Fund last year. I won’t use one that is backtested; I’m interested in real results. And since I am interested in real results, if a service doesn’t show me it can beat the market (i.e., not report their performance), I’m not sure why I would follow them? If you’re telling me you can beat the market, you gotta show me that you can…well, beat the market. Otherwise, I don’t really understand the point.
I prefer the buy and hold approach. I believe it makes sense in the long term, it causes a lot less stress trying to figure out what to do, and in the course of a March 2020 crash, it keeps me from having to make a decision when I’m panicking about what move to make. I was 100% in the C Fund for many, many years. Now that I am close to retiring and pulling some money out, I have switched to my retirement allocation of 70% C and 30% G. That is my planned ratio over the next decade or two. I’m not recommending that allocation to you, although for some of you, it would be much better than what you’ve been trying to do—time the market.
If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know this is a fairly recent change for me. I’m within a couple of years of pulling my TSP money out and I wanted to protect some for withdrawals (see my Barbell Strategy from last month), so in 2019 I went 70/30. Prior to that, I was happily 100% C Fund for years. And I slept fine through crashes and booms.
TSP Wealth. For some reason, TSP Wealth did not provide their performance returns for 2019. They did so for all of the other years prior, but according to their website, the returns page has not been updated since 10-13-19. I don’t know if this means they no longer operate, or they just didn’t like their returns, so they hid them, or something else. Regardless, that’s the reason you see the “Unknown” entered for them.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Priorities of work. If you aren’t maxing out your TSP contributions, spend your energy trying to figure out how to get yourself to that point, rather than spending so much time trying to time the market. More important that you contribute all you can than chase a return you might never catch.
Buyer beware. I’m not endorsing any of these sites. Do your own homework, and accept your own consequences.
Trust but verify. I firmly believe my numbers are correct. But I provide you all the tools to go to these websites and verify the numbers yourself. And the prices.
Help me. If you know of a service that’s not on here, let me know. I’ll add it and include it in future years. I try to get them all, but maybe a new one has popped up I don’t know about.
The Future. What does 2020 hold? Who knows. It’s been a wild ride so far. I don’t follow the allocation services throughout the year—it’s just too monumental of a task, so I don’t know if there is one beating the market. Typically in down years of the market, some of the services do better, since they are more conservative than just the market itself. Tune in Spring 2021 for the final results.
Lastly, I always end this annual paper with two quotes from some of the greatest investors of all-time. I’d much rather you listen to them than me, any day! The one from Ben Graham is particularly insightful for 2020, as I know a number of you sold at the bottom of the March crash.
“After nearly fifty years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it [market timing] successfully, and consistently. I don’t even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently” -- John Bogle, founder of Vanguard
“The primary cause of failure [in the market] is that they pay too much attention to what the stock market is doing currently” – Benjamin Graham, author of The Intelligent Investor, and Warren Buffett’s mentor
Without further ado, the button below contains a .pdf of the hard data, aka, the straight dope.
Disclaimer. This article (and all of the others I’ve written) are provided for information and educational purposes only. They are not meant to be financial advice, or a substitution for professional financial help. They are meant, however, to help you become more educated, and for you to have a more intelligent conversation with the competent financial professional of your choice. Read more on the Privacy/Legal tab on this site.