THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR AND INVESTMENT FUNDS
Channel: Value Investing with Sven Carlin, Ph.D.
Date: 30/05/2018

What do I do? Full-time independent stock market analyst and researcher:
https://sven-carlin-research-platform.teachable.com/p/stock-market-research-platform

Check the comparative stock list table on my Stock market research platform under curriculum preview!

I am also a book author:
Modern Value Investing book:
https://amzn.to/2lvfH3t

More about me and some written reports at the Sven Carlin blog: https://svencarlin.com

Stock market for modern value investors Facebook Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/modernvalueinvesting/

The main difference between index funds investing today and in Graham’s time are the fees which in some cases were up to 9% entry fee back then while now you can buy a market fund with a yearly asset management fee of 0.04%. Further, at his time there weren’t any actual index funds that are the key investment vehicle at the moment, especially if an ETF.
Graham on mutual funds
Graham believes that the average investor does better by investing in funds rather than investing is stocks directly as funds promote the “good habits of savings and investing”. Those good habits are unfortunately not promoted by ETFs as the only purpose of those is to be tradable which is something you don’t want to do when you are a defensive investor and own a fund. 
Funds’ performance
What is interesting is that the funds analyzed by Graham performed better than the Dow Jones index and in line with the S&P 500. However, when digging deeper and analyzing the best performers he points how some of the managers took undue speculative risks to reach those results which is something investors should be careful about. 
Graham further describes the typical stock market story where funds always set out to beat the market and the handful that do attract even more capital that allows them to continue to do so for a while. When the opposite happens, such funds are usually mergered into other funds so you don’t even hear about those anymore. 
Something similar is going on with current markets where index funds did really well and as money keeps coming in, those continue to do well. However, Graham describes such performance by using a French quote:
“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”
That literarily means: “The more it changes the more it is the same “.
Applying this to the new environment, as index funds keep going up, I am scared of what it will look like when the 35 year trend reverts. 
Buy closed end funds
If you want to invest in funds Graham’s take is to buy closed end funds that cannot take anymore financing and thus focus on performance. Needles to say, one such fund is Berkshire. Further, you should buy only at 10% to 15% discount to asset value. In the case of BRK this should be at around 1.2 of book value as much of BRK’s value is not on the books. 
Back to index funds
So, according to Graham, if we must buy actively managed funds we should buy discounted closed end funds in order to get value when we buy. As index funds weren’t yet introduced back then we can only estimate what would Graham’s take be on them but given Graham’s preference for a simple 75% to 25% stock bond allocation for the defensive investor what would make it even easier it using an index fund like the S&P 500. When stocks are expensive you hold more bonds and vice versa. 
As the price to earnings ratio of the S&P 500 is now 24.87 implying a long term earnings yield of 4% we could say stocks are expensive as the 2-year Treasury bond yields 2.57% at no risk. Further, corporate earnings are stretched thanks to tax benefits and 8 years of economic expansion and low interest rates.
Figure 1 S&P 500 price to earnings ratio 
Source: Multpl
4% at high risk as the S&P 500 can easily go down to 1,500 points versus 2.57% at no risk is a good question to answer where each one of us has to make.
Nevertheless, if we return to Grahams key investing habits of saving and investing on a monthly basis you should actually rejoice a stock market crash as you would be able to buy more and have a higher dividend yield and return on investment over time. 
Conclusion
I am not usually saying that index funds are bad but simply that the risk at current levels is too high for the returns and the lower yielding Treasury is better from a risk reward perspective than an index funds. I think Graham would agree as stocks were extremely expensive for him in 1971 where we can see above the price to earnings ratio was close to 19.