Most stock funds fail to beat the market.
Yet a lot of folks are still mighty confident they can pick the winners. If you survey investors, probably 80 percent say they're better than average. But at most, only 50 percent can be. Ira Weiss, an accounting professor at Columbia Business School, looked at fund performance over the 36 years through December 1997. This 10.2 percent average included the performance of both existing and defunct funds and was dollar-weighted, so that the result reflected which funds were most popular with investors.