DAL Investments suggests that we should dispense with narrowly focused benchmarks for evaluating actively managed mutual funds, according to The New York Times. “As much as people in the fund industry may want to measure their performance against a narrowly defined index, the reality is that most investors judge their returns against the S.& P. 500, for better or worse,” writes Times reporter Paul Sullivan. That’s hardly a rationale for using the S&P 500, or any one benchmark, for analyzing a wide spectrum of investment strategies. Using one index certainly simplifies the critical task of portfolio attribution, but at what cost?

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● The Handbook of Equity Market Anomalies: Translating Market Inefficiencies into Effective Investment Strategies
By Len Zacks
Summary via publisher, Wiley
The Handbook of Equity Market Anomalies organizes and summarizes research carried out by hundreds of finance and accounting professors over the last twenty years to identify and measure equity market inefficiencies and provides self-directed individual investors with a framework for incorporating the results of this research into their own investment processes. Edited by Len Zacks, CEO of Zacks Investment Research, and written by leading professors who have performed groundbreaking research on specific anomalies, this book succinctly summarizes the most important anomalies that savvy investors have used for decades to beat the market.

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