Barclays Global Investors asks that rude question. Let s start with lost money. The substitution of a mutual fund grab bag for the carefully engineered risk management strategy that serves as the foundation for most corporate pension funds. M. Barton Waring, a Managing Director at Barclays Global and one of the three authors of the paper, summarized the problem another way. Big investors put their effort into asset allocation and risk control.
Little investors get a list of funds and are told to do it themselves.
We ve tried a hundred ways to help people do this for themselves. But people aren t doing it. We need to do it for them. Even if you could teach this, most people wouldn t go back to rebalance their portfolios, he explained in a recent telephone interview. The problem isn t the aggregate, it s what the individual has , he said.