>Can anyone help with this? Doug? Is it saying that the only folks
>who made money in the buble were the professionals? the insiders? I
>don't quite follow.
>
>Thanks, Joanna
>_________________________
>
>In the 2/25 issue of Barron's, Ableson wrote the following:
>
>"Dalbar, a Boston-based outfit that for a quarter of a century has
>been specializing in doing a wide range of research on financial
>service outfits, conspicuously including mutual funds, recently
>unveiled its findings on a study of how equity fund holders fared in
>the late, great bull market.
>
>And what it discovered is either shocking, if you're shockable, or
>just plain startling, if you're not. For, according to Dalbar, in
>the stretch from 1984 through 2000, when the S & P racked up an
>average annual return of 16.3%, the average equity fund investor
>wound up with a yearly return of a mere 5.32%. Not good.
Just poked around the Dalbar website and couldn't find anything like this. It's kind of hard to say who the "average investor" is here. How'd they do the study? Abelson's a witty guy, but journalists don't like to get into those boring methodological questions. But without them, it's hard to figure out what this means.
Doug