Good reads from around the Web.

Moves are afoot to compel active und managers to reveal their ‘active share’ – an indication of the degree to which their portfolios differ from the market.

The greatest benefit would be to highlight closet tracker funds. These are active funds that charge high fees but can only ever deliver less than average returns because they essentially track the market.

Getting market returns while paying high costs is a guaranteed bad deal. A big benefit of market-tracking passive investing is that low charges leave you with more of your own money to compound over time.

The FT says [search result] that some fund managers are already planning to highlight their active share to investors:

Threadneedle Investments, which manages £92bn of assets, said it plans to begin disclosing the “active share” percentage on its fund factsheets and believes others should do the same.

“It’s something would have real merit and we would support seeing developed into an industry standard and normal market practice,” said Iain Richards, Threadneedle’s head of corporate governance and responsible investment.

“There is a valid concern about closet index tracking funds that charge active fees. It’s clear investors need better transparency around this and more consistent disclosure of a fund’s active share measure is one part of the solutions.”

Obviously this could be pressed into service as a marketing ploy for funds that are going through a good spell as much as any noble act of transparency. But it’s still a development I’d welcome.

Some people like to invest in active funds. They need to better understand what they’re buying.

More active might mean better returns…

For one thing, research suggests – at least to some onlookers – that high active share may be a signal that a fund manager has genuine market-beating potential.

I’ve not been convinced by what I’ve read, although I’d stress I’ve not rigorously investigated it all. I’ve simply come across various summaries over the years.

One big hesitancy I’ve had is that it seems obvious that a set of market-beating active funds is going to comprise of mainly funds that don’t look like the index.

If they held the same shares as the index, then by definition they wouldn’t have beaten it!

Yet presumably many of the funds that lose the most also look very different from the index, for exactly the same reason. (This is what gave rise to the practice of closet index tracking in the first place – better for a highly paid fund manager to be safe than sorry).

Perhaps this has all been taken into account in the research into active share. I need to set aside a Sunday to find out.

…but what do you care?

People tend to find what they’re looking for in this sort of thing.

For instance, I like and often link to the writings of the value investing team at Schroders, which has a blog called The Value Perspective.

This week one of their number found comfort in academic research that suggested that as well as a high active share, the best performing fund managers rarely trade:

The great majority of the outperformance of the universe of funds considered by Cremers and Pareek comes from the ‘high active share/long holding period’ group.

In other words, while not specifically on the subject of value, their paper appears to show that being prepared to be contrarian and patient – as value investors often are – plays a big part in achieving strong investment performance.

I sent a link to the article to occasional Monevator contributor The Analyst, as I know he likes to buy and hold for the very long-term.

Yet barely an hour later, I came across other research saying that actually, very high turnover active funds do better.

So I sent him that along as well.

With a shrug.

And that’s another reason to go passive – opting out of all this debate with a smile of ‘who cares’!

[continue reading…]

I have explained before how a mortgage is money rented from a bank.

When you buy your first property with a mortgage, you don’t leave the renting classes behind – you simply do your business at the more respectable end of the High Street, and rent the money needed to buy the house from Natwest or Nationwide.

Instead of giving brown envelopes stuffed with tenners to a bloke called Trevor every Thursday for the honor of living in his dive in New Cross (in spirit, I appreciate we all use bank transfers nowadays), as a newly indebted homeowner you pay ‘money rent’ every month to the bank on the lump sum it lent you to buy your home.

It’s a different way of thinking about home buying and mortgages. It doesn’t mean in itself that renting or buying is better or worse.

By the same token, this article is also not about whether you should own a home or not (or whether prices will go up or down or whether the younger generation is shafted or whether the market will crash next Tuesday or any of the usual).

It’s a thought experiment.

Let’s imagine we’re dressed in white togas eating grapes like Greek philosophers, and have ponder.

A house? For me? How kind!

So, a mortgage is money rented from a bank. Sort of.

But what about when you rent a property from a landlord?

Is that just, well, renting a property?

Of course.

But there is another way of looking at what’s going on, which adds another financial jui jitsu move to your mental arsenal.

Instead of thinking of your landlord as someone who owns the house or flat they rent to you, you might think of your landlord as someone who borrows £250,000 or £500,000 or whatever to buy the property on your behalf.

He or she borrows the money, and as a result you don’t need to do so.

You pay him rent for the privilege of him borrowing this money. The cost is usually marked up for his trouble, so your rent is higher than if you’d rented the money from the bank yourself.

In addition, your decision to rent hands the option to make money from rises in the property’s price to your landlord.

Then again, you’re also insulated from the risk of falling house prices.

The interesting thing about landlords and mortgages

This is in fact very close to what happens in practice.

Let’s say you’re renting 29 Acacia Avenue from your lovely landlord, a Mr E. Wimp Esq.

You pay him £1,000 a month to rent his house, and when you see him in the street you tug your forelock (whatever a forelock is) and generally feel like one of the oppressed classes.

You presume Mr Wimp owns the house – and legally he does.

However he doesn’t own it outright.

Instead, like any financially savvy landlord, Wimp bought the house with an interest-only mortgage. He repays no capital, and in fact as house prices go up he remortgages every few years, increasing his debt on the house and rolling the equity released into new deals to buy more houses.

Buying, growing, releasing equity, and re-investing capital that’s leveraged through Other People’s Money – i.e. mortgages – is the heart of most property enrichment schemes. It gives Mr Wimp access to financial firepower that he could probably never have amassed in his lifetime from saving alone.

And Mr Wimp enjoys another great benefit from using interest-only mortgages to finance his properties.

The interest he pays on a mortgage can be offset against the rental income you pay him, in order to reduce his taxable profits.

For this reason, a landlord will typically try to keep his or her interest-only mortgage payments at about the same level as rental income. This way they can effectively reduce their tax liability on the rental income to zero. (Especially as he also gets to make deductions for wear and tear and the like).

When the mortgage – and hence the capital owed – comes due after 25 years or so, a landlord would usually aim to either sell-up the property and repay the mortgage, pocketing the difference, or else refinance the property with a new mortgage.

The alternative strategy – steadily amassing equity in a property by gradually buying it outright with capital repayments – would over time reduce the mortgage interest bill. This would therefore increase taxable profits – and taxes paid – as there’s less interest paid to offset against the rental income.

Of course a landlord might choose to own a property outright for other reasons – such as avoiding having to sell or re-finance in 25 years – but from a near-term tax efficiency perspective, a big interest-only mortgage is the way to go.

(Capital gains tax is another matter altogether. Whereas an owner-occupier can sell her home free of capital gains tax, a landlord is liable for taxes on capital gains).

It’ll cost you extra

As a renter, instead of you using a big mortgage to buy your property, your landlord has taken out a big mortgage to own the same property and to rent it to you.1

However in both cases you – the occupier – is servicing the mortgage.

• If you own the property, you’re repaying your mortgage to the bank, likely over 25 years, and probably repaying capital as as well as interest.

• If you rent the property, you’re paying your landlord’s mortgage, which is likely interest-only, via your rental payments.

Typically the rent paid to your landlord will cost you more than if you bought the same property via an interest-only mortgage.

This is because landlords aren’t in it for charity, and they want to make a profit.

Note: An interest-only mortgage is the correct kind to use for like-for-like comparisons between the different options, because it ignores capital repayments. Such repayment of capital is a separate issue (really it’s a form of saving).

Consider a two-bed property that costs £200,000 to buy:

• A 4% interest-only mortgage costs £666 a month over 25 years.

• Your landlord might charge say £750 rent a month– which is an effective rate on £200,000 of 4.5%.

By renting, it’s as if you’re paying a slightly more expensive interest-only mortgage than the landlord, and in addition you’ve hedged out house price gains and falls.

You’ve given up security of tenure in the deal, too.

On the other hand, you didn’t have to put in a deposit, so your free capital can be earning money elsewhere.

In addition, your landlord has to account for wear and tear to the property, whereas you can call him up for a new boiler. There’s also a risk that if you move out he won’t immediately find new tenants, forcing him to cover the gap in payments from his savings.

But you can’t bang nails into his walls.

However he paid all the transaction costs of buying the property. You just paid a month’s rent as a deposit.

And around and around we go…

The point is there’s a mix of pros and cons.

Lording it up

The key idea I wanted to get across today is the relationship between your rental payments and the landlord’s mortgage.

But here’s a few consequences to think about.

One very strong case for home ownership is to be your own landlord

If someone wants to rent you a property, then clearly they think it’s worth at least the monthly interest-only bill to do so, plus profit coming from either the surplus over the mortgage from the rent or gains in house prices, or both.

But as I mentioned, as well as any profit margin and an allowance for wear and tear, a landlord also has to charge a higher rent to cover the risk that a tenant doesn’t pay up or of a gap between tenancies.

As a homeowner you are effectively letting the property to yourself and these things are under your control. So unless you’re a member of a 1970s heavy metal band with a penchant for throwing TVs out of windows, you’re your own ideal tenant. By buying and renting the property to yourself, you get a better deal, because you pocket the profit margin, and you’re not paying extra to cover those overheads and unknowns.

Owning a home is more tax efficient than renting one

It’s true that UK home buyers no longer get mortgage interest tax relief, and that does put the landlord at a slight advantage from that perspective. However on the portion of your home that you own you’re effectively paying monthly rent (as imputed rent) free of tax issues. In contrast if you were renting you’d have to find the money to pay for the whole house each month out of taxed income.

For instance, if you own £100,000 of that £200,000 house, then you might have say £750 of ‘imputed rent’ that you don’t actually pay, and equally that you don’t have to find out of your taxed income. (This is a weird concept I know, so read the Wikipedia page on imputed rent).

Your home is also free of capital gains tax if you sell, so if you downsize to a smaller place or leave the property market, you don’t pay tax on any money that’s released. Landlords gains will be taxed.

Presumably, in a rational market the landlord takes that future tax liability into account when setting rents. So as a homeowner you should be able to make the maths work more comfortably than the landlord can.

Money NOT in property is NOT automatically dead money

I hope this post is another way of seeing that money spent on rent is not ‘dead money’.

Whether you rent or have a mortgage, you’re still paying an interest bill.

Equally, even if you’ve paid off your mortgage, the capital locked up in your home is not being invested elsewhere. And that has an opportunity cost.

Now I happen to believe most people do much better owning their own home than with shares, which is the only asset class likely to keep up with UK house price inflation over the long-term.

But if you’re a skilled investor who can earn, say, 10-15% a year from investing on average, then it might be worth renting from a landlord, even at an effectively higher interest rate, in order to avoid having to sink a big deposit into a property. You’d invest instead of paying off a mortgage. You’d have to be investing in an ISA or a SIPP to match the CGT-free nature of owning your own home.

Keep in mind though that a home bought with a mortgage is a geared investment, and those are very hard to beat with ungeared investments – presuming house prices keep going up at historical rates, of course. (If house prices fall for 20 years you’ll be laughing).

You might not be ready or able to buy yet

The reality is that not everyone can buy, even if monthly mortgage payments would be lower than their landlord’s monthly payments plus their mark-up (aka their rent). They may not have a deposit, or they may not be considered a good credit risk by a bank.

This has always been true for many 20-somethings – the controversy today is that it’s true of many people in their 30s and 40s, too.

A lot of it comes down to house prices

I have danced on a pinhead above discussing how a landlord may make a few more quid from rent after costs and so on. In reality, most landlords who got into the game in the 1990s have made out like bandits from house price appreciation, compared to any profits they made from rent.

Most old-time landlords say price appreciation should always the eventual goal, but when buy-to-let mortgages and legislation changes first democratized being a property mogul, it was also common wisdom that you should get at least a 10% yield on your purchase price.

Today yields are far smaller – more like 4-7% – but then mortgage rates are also far lower. Ultimately, winners and losers will likely be decided by the trajectory of the UK property market over the next 10-20 years – the ‘option on house prices’ I mentioned that a renter gives up to a landlord.

None of this is rocket science, but I hope it’s revealed a few of the semi-hidden dynamics of renting versus buying a home.

Please note: Constructive discussion about the mechanics of the UK property market in the comments would be great. Tirades about greedy landlords / young renters who spend all their deposit on iPhones / how the UK is going down the toilet unless we vote UKIP will probably be deleted.

1. As I said before, we will leave any rights and wrongs of this for another day… Head to HousePriceCrash if you can’t wait, rather than arguing it here please. [↩]

The profitability (or quality) factor boasts a number of traits that makes it particularly interesting for passive investors:

• Profitability beat the market by 4% per year between 1963 and 2011.

• It’s strong in large cap equities – a rare treat for a return premium.

• It’s particularly powerful when partnered with investments in the value and small cap premiums because it’s negatively correlated with both.

• Profitable equities tend to suffer less in a downturn than the total market.

Profitability works by concentrating on the firms that exhibit traits which are suggestive of rude business health in the future. It’s a bit like looking a potential mate up and down and determining their fitness according to the size of particular dangly bits. On an individual basis, you’ll often be disappointed, but apply the profitability criteria to enough candidates and on aggregate it seems to work.

The real power of profitability though may come from combining it in a portfolio with other financial steroids like value funds.

US Professor Robert Novy-Marx revived interest in the profitability factor with his work showing that a dollar invested in the US market in July 1973 grew to over $80 by the end of 2011.

But if you’d invested it in value and profitable equities instead, then that dollar would have grown to $572 (before expenses)

That’s a 615% increase.

Tempting.

The Holy Grail of diversification

The combination works because profitable companies are generally larger and more highly valued by book-to-market ratio than traditional value equities.

The outcome of holding them both is the holy grail of diversification: negatively correlated assets.

When profitable companies are on a roll, value firms tend to flop, and vice versa.

Bring together those complementary behaviours, and you have a portfolio that’s better able to resist a severe dip – because one of the factors should buffer you against the misfortune of the other.

This means you’re taking less overall risk in your portfolio, even though both factors are risky in and of themselves.

Big profits are beautiful

The large cap tilt of profitability also means it’s likely to bear up when small caps are going through a rough patch.

This is important for practical reasons, too. It’s hard for UK passive investors to invest in truly small cap equities. Most so-called small cap funds tend to invest more in mid caps, in reality.

Yet premiums like value, momentum and size are usually more powerfully present among smaller equities.

This means that while a return premium may deliver eyebrow-raising returns on paper, the reality of real-life investing is that those theoretical numbers can be leeched away if you have to invest in funds that don’t capture the most potent sources of return, such as micro cap equities.

Funds are also undermined by their management and transaction costs and their inability to easily short poorly performing equities, in comparison to the theoretical returns offered by the premiums as touted by academics.

Happily though, the paper Global Return Premiums on Earnings Quality, Value, and Size shows that a long-only portfolio1 can deliver strong returns by combining value and profitability.

This twin tilt beat the market by 3.9% among large caps, and 5.8% among small caps.

In comparison to a pure value tilt, the addition of profitability added 1.2% to the large cap returns and an extra 1.8% to small caps.

The effect becomes more pronounced still when you throw momentum into the mix, as this factor is negatively correlated with value and has a low correlation with profitability and small cap.

To actually invest in profitability check out our review of UK quality ETFs.

Take it steady,

The Accumulator

1. That is, one that doesn’t short equities. [↩]