Beating Benchmark

According to Bianco Research, only 17% of more than 4,000 funds that invest in large U.S. stocks beat their benchmark for the 2011 calendar year. In most years, fewer than half do. According to Bianco’s research, the return correlation of U.S. stocks has quadrupled since the mid-1990s.

As recently as 1997, it took 20 stocks to eliminate most of the likelihood of enduring more risk than the market as a whole; today, according to Bianco, it takes 40.