The Vice Fund has outperformed the S&P 500 since 2004. They invest in sinful stocks as its managers describe it:
Designed with the goal of delivering better risk-adjusted returns than the S&P 500 Index. It invests primarily in stocks in the tobacco, alcohol, gaming and defence industries. Vice Funds believe these industries tend to thrive regardless of the economy as a whole.
The Vice Fund was founded in 2002 to specialise in socially irresponsible stocks such as gambling, alcohol , tobacco and defence contracting. The Vice Fund is not recession proof, but did do better in the 2009 market crash.
The Vice fund also has high management fees of 2%. Americans can buy Vanguard’s or Fidelity’s index funds and pay only 0.1% in expenses. The Vice Fund may have buckled under the heat because it has rebranded:
The Vice Fund is now called the Barrier Fund. The investment strategy and the portfolio manager have not changed… The Barrier Fund invests in companies, both domestic and foreign, within industries that have significant barriers to entry.
To confuse further, the Catholic Values Fund revealed that it shared investments in defence contractors with the Vice Fund. The Vice Fund invested in staid Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft.
In 2014, just 21 percent of the funds that pick U.S. stocks beat their benchmarks, according to Morningstar. Investors have noticed and voted with their feet, swapping their actively managed funds for low-cost index and exchange-traded funds…
Some $13.1 trillion was invested in U.S. mutual funds at the end of 2014. Of the $8.3 trillion in stock funds, 38 percent was passively managed. Yet that’s double the percentage at the end of 2004.
If ‘socialism’ is defined as ‘ownership of the means of production by the workers’ — and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition — then the United States is the first truly ‘Socialist’ country (Peter Drucker, 1976, p. 1).
Figure 1. Evolution of aggregate stock ownership
Figure 2. Stock ownership of US mutual funds and pension funds
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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