I appreciate the info about real estate funds, and the tables, but a quick search at Vanguard, Schwab and Fido shows that none of the three GO funds Mr Freeland has in the table with the best Sharpe Ratios over five years ( TIPRX VCMIX GIREX) are available to individual investors.
A broader search since inception shows the same 14 great owl funds, but again the only ones with Sharpe ratios over 1.02 and std dev under 10 and Max DD under 8% are unavailable to individual investors, and are all interval funds.
An interval fund is not traded daily, and the company is not obligated to allow redemptions at any time other than the end of the quarter and then for only 5% of total assets. If everyone wants out, too bad, even if you need the money to pay for junior's college.
While the Apollo fund apparently is available directly thru Apollo, with a low minimum, there is a sales charge.
MFO Premium search has a function for interval funds, but only to search only for them, not to exclude them.
I am glad Mr Freeland put in the hard work gathering the information, but it is less useful to us individual investors than I initially thought, as the best funds are really unavailable.
Comments
A quick follow-up.
1. I added the table to Mark's article as a way of giving folks leads. He's an innocent victim of my good intentions.
2. MFO Premium's screener defaults to providing the oldest share class of each portfolio, and that's often the institutional class. In the case of Griffin Institutional Access, for example, there are four share classes available. Likewise, the BlueRock fund has a $2,500 share class. While many "A" shares have a nominal sales charge, those are frequently avoidable.
3. In some cases, the funds are indeed targeted to institutional investors, which does represent a slice of our readership. (Who knew?) Many are advisors. Charles has noted in the past that funds that were nominally institutional were available at Schwab, through his former retirement plan, for $2,500. Intermittently I've noticed the same at TD.
So I guess I mostly trust that readers will check out both the appropriateness and the availability of interesting funds.
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You're right about interval funds. They typically invest in illiquid assets (or not very liquid ones) which offer unique investment characteristics by virtue of their illiquidity. (Owning an apartment building offers vastly different risks and rewards than owning a share of Tesla, for instance.) That makes it impossible for a manager to offer daily liquidity to shareholders. And just as you wouldn't put the money for Junior's fall tuition in shares of Tesla because you can't be assured they'd be there when you needed them, you wouldn't put them in an interval fund either.
For what that's worth,
David