Kurt Dupuis:
Welcome to the Whole Truth, where two wholesalers help financial professionals build great practices and thrive in a rapidly changing industry. We'll bring you the stories and voices from those on the front lines of this change, and we'll have some fun along the way.
Steve Seid:
We're building a community of financial professionals who are growing forward thinking and want to get better. Thanks for listening and contributing to the discussion.
Disclosure:
The views expressed herein are those of the participants and not those of touchstone investments.
Steve Seid:
And welcome everybody to the Whole Truth in the Bay Area, California. I am Steve Seid.
Kurt Dupuis:
And from Atlanta, Georgia. I am Kurt Dupuis.
Steve Seid:
We’ve got Dr. Martijn Cremers on the show. That might ring a bell for a few people, particularly folks that are, I don't want to say nerdy Kurt, but into the weeds on investment selection. He wrote a paper called "Active Share1," I guess, what was it, the mid two thousands that came out, I forget the original date?
Kurt Dupuis:
I think it was 09-ish?
Steve Seid:
Yeah, it was. Anyways, he came out with the paper in the mid two thousands on active share that was really kind of paradigm shifting, game changing, whatever you want to call it. Since then, he's had subsequent research on active management and what really matters. And it really did challenge the basic conclusions that were out there, that active management just doesn't work.
Kurt Dupuis:
And that's always ironic to me because you read news headlines and you see “how prevalent ETFs are”, “active is dead”, “all this money going to passive”. But anecdotally, I don't know what your experience is I talk to financial professionals every day and there's not much consensus around that. A lot of financial professionals still believe in active. They want active. And I mean, if anyone has ever talked about active share, which I see from more and more asset managers, from more and more data companies, Dr. Cremers is the godfather of all that. So it's really his work that thrust that into the common nomenclature. And so we talk about what the heck that thing is because even people that say they know what active share is don't really quite have a refined understanding of what it is. I think we probably said it three times in the conversation. It's a starting point. We talked about the pillars of skill, conviction and opportunity. Those are the characteristics that tend to drive outperformance over the long-term.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, patience as well. And I think that's what Kurt just mentioned is the utility here. We all kind of know you shouldn't just look at static, backward looking 1, 3, 5, 10 returns. We know we want to look at that, we want to understand it, but if that's all you're doing, frankly it's probably not a successful approach. So what should you be looking at? And I think what's so powerful about Dr. Cremer's research is it really gets into things that matter, things that can be predictive. And it's these kinds of things that I think could take investment processes to the next level.
Kurt Dupuis:
So, the main takeaway here is "Have a process." Yes. So I just run into all the time, you know, need your 10 commandments of how and why you invest client capital. I don't particularly care what those 10 commandments are. Just have a process, Seid and I do this each and every day, is help advisors think and work through kind of an investment discipline. So have a process. If you don't have one, reach out. We're happy to help out or some of our other colleagues wherever you are in the country, but have a process and Active Share is as good as any place to start.
Steve Seid:
Absolutely. If you're listening to this, although these are supposed to be evergreen, but we're recording this at the end of 2022, I just want to thank everyone for a great year with this show. Want to thank Kurt, you as well. We crossed 50 episodes this year. We've done this for another year. I don't know, it seems like an appropriate time to say thanks. So if you could do us one favor, one maybe holiday present is to go in and if you haven't subscribed, if you haven't shared the show, I know everyone says this at every podcast, but could you please do that for us? That would be cool. That would be a plus for us. Please do. And without further ado, here is our conversation with Dr. Martijn Cremers.
All right, well we are very happy to be joined by Dr. Martijn Cremers, the Dean of the Notre Dame Business School. Dr. Cremers, thank you for joining us.
Martijn Cremers:
Well thank you. I'm very grateful for having me.
Steve Seid:
I've known you for a long time, a huge fan of your research. I think a lot of folks are. Let's start from the beginning. I think the groundbreaking research that we got to know you for was this concept of active shares. What is active share?
Martijn Cremers:
So active share is a basic tool to assess how differently an actively managed fund is invested from the markets, from its benchmark, compares its portfolio weights of the fund to the portfolio weights of its benchmark, and then assesses how different is it? Maybe a simple example. So let's take a stock like Amazon. Let's say that the fund invests 3% of its capital in Amazon stock. If the benchmark also has 3% of its capital in Amazon stock, then the position of both the fund and the benchmark in Amazon stock is identical. So it's an overlapping weight.
So for that particular stock, right, because it's identical, the fund is actually not active in our minds. So then think about all of the stocks that are both in the fund and in benchmark. So if you sum up all the overlapping positions that are identical in both, and you deduct that from a hundred percent, you have active share.
Steve Seid:
Hmmm.
Martjin Cremers:
So that's a share that is not overlapping, that is different. And active share can be achieved in a couple of ways. In the example, if you invest more than 3% in Apple stock, then any weight above 3% will be an active overweight, which contributes positively to active share. Any weight less than 3% is also going to be active position. So again, active share is a very basic tool that allows you to assess how much stock picking does the manager actually do.
Steve Seid:
So you've got this concept of active share, it's measuring how different a manager is from their respective benchmark. Then what, once you ran the numbers, you sort of looked at all the managers in the universe. What were your general conclusions from that original study?
Martijn Cremers:
In our original study, which we published in 2009, I wrote that when I was still at Yale University with a co-author who was also at Yale at the time. It was actually the very first paper I’d actually written.
Steve Seid:
Is that right?
Martijn Cremers:
I ever wrote on mutual funds. Yes.
Steve Seid:
Wow!
Martjin Cremers:
So you please be generous when you read it because again, that's the first paper I ever wrote on mutual funds.
Steve Seid:
Yep.
Martijin Cremers:
So our conclusions were that a lot of funds are not that active. And so when you're looking for a truly active manager, it actually is very worthwhile to look at the active share to make sure that if you're looking for active manager, that you actually get one. We also found more generally speaking, that's funds with a low active share, that they do substantially underperform and because they are so many, they were actually responsible for the one thing that everyone generally seems to know about actively managed funds. Most people are very aware of it that the average typical, average managed mutual fund has underperformance if you look at the last 20, 30 years. Well that is the case, but it's really driven by the 46% of funds with the lowest active share.
What we found is a very strong connection between having a low active share and subsequently underperforming your benchmark. So that was a big result. And then for the high active share funds, we didn't find strong underperformance. So I think our findings on the one hand of creating a new tool that's very simple and therefore I hope intuitive showing that a lot of funds are not that active. And then this relationship with performance I think got a lot of people's attention. And I've written probably in the overly large number of subsequent papers as a followup.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. And that's a pretty profound conclusion. And to restate what you just said, we've had this broad conclusion from the academic community, if I could say it, that, oh, active management doesn't work, right? We talk about the Vanguard studies and things like that, and then we're ushering in the area of ETFs because why pay for an active manager? And this is not a downside of ETFs. The question that you were looking to answer "is there value in active management?" Because at that point the answer academically was no. I'm curious of the origins here. Why did you even start down this path? How did you think about this path? Was it simply you were looking at active management and going, this is kind of a heterogeneous sample set? How did this idea come up?
Martijn Cremers:
What happened was that, I still try to do this, but I was reading the Wall Street Journal and then as I still try to do, you look at interesting stories in the Wall Street Journal and think about, "well, is there an interesting academic angle here?" There was a really interesting “My View” Wall Street Journal article where the author was looking at the largest US Equity fund in the world at that point in time, which happened to be the Fidelity Magellan fund. And the article was a debate really between a critic of the fund who argued that it was a closest index fund, as it was called. It argued that the fund was basically extremely similar to its benchmark. And on the other hand, the people who were managing the fund, they argued, "no, not at all, we are very different." Then they were looking at the traditional measure of active management, which is tracking error2 volatility or shorts tracking error.
So it's just correlation of the difference in returns. So it's tracking error volatility or its tracking error was low, that was taken as evidence for closet indexing. The fund says, no, it is not closet indexing, we're actually quite active. It's simply because we're so good at risk management, we're so well diversified that you have a low tracking error. And I remember reading this and thinking, "why are they debating this? Why just not just look and the two portfolios, just look under the hood, look what's in the Fidelity Magellan fund, look what's in the S&P 500 and see how different they are." So that was my basic intuition…
Steve Seid:
No kidding.
Martijn Cremers:
…and then of course we did that together with the co-author and that's how we cooked up Active Share.
Kurt Dupuis:
I've been at Touchstone nearly six years. We don't talk about tracking error much. We obviously talk about active share fair bit. Can you sort of give us definitionally the distinction between tracking error and active share?
Martijn Cremers:
Yes. So tracking error and active share are two different measures that both try to gather the same idea. The idea is how differently invested is the fund relative to its benchmark. Ideally you could use both of them at the same time. So how are they different? Well, tracking error only looks at returns, active share only looks at holdings. It's a snapshot in time. When you look at what particular point in time, what's in the fund at that same point in time, what is in the benchmark? And because they look at different data, it's actually very beneficial to combine them.
Right, and so in our 2009 paper, we show you how to do that. So you can think of funds with a high active share that may not have a high tracking volatility if indeed they are well diversified. On the other hand, you may have funds with somewhat low active share that still may have a high tracking volatility if the fund takes concentrated bets in particular industries or sectors. An example of the latter would be factor investing funds, for example, momentum funds. So tracking error and active share are two very different measures, they're not that highly correlated and I think it's useful to understand how both of them look for particular funds.
Steve Seid:
So with the active share research, to me the conclusion is if you're going to pay for active management, you want to look for those high active share managers, you want to fish from that pond. Did you have any conclusions about tracking error?
Martijn Cremers:
Not really. We didn't find any strong association between tracking error and performance.
Steve Seid:
Got it.
Martijn Cremers:
Your point though about expenses is quite important, it is that I like to say that there's no issue at all for a fund to have a low active share as long as its expenses are very low. The issue really comes only in terms of if you have a combination of funds with a low active share and high expenses.
Kurt Dupuis:
A framework that Seid and I talk about a lot probably in life, but definitely in financial services is signal versus noise. We have a lot of research in the asset management world coming from academia. Why did this have such a big impact in the industry as kind of a signal indicator and something that people should pay attention to.
Martijn Cremers:
On the one hand, I think active share became widely used because it's such a simple tool, right? On the other hand, more practically speaking, what happened was early on, major data providers like Morningstar and FactSet started to incorporate active share into, in their data, in their data products. So that led to a lot of attention as well. The other thing that happened early on was that truly active managers, they now with active share had a new tool to explain to the world that they were substantially different than the market. And so the combination of that, I think led to active share being somewhat I think a basic tool for investments for investment analysis.
Kurt Dupuis:
Active share is the starting point. It's a really good starting point, but it's one crucial early input. You've done a lot of research since then of other characteristics that tend to drive outperformance. Can you talk about some of those other inputs?
Martijn Cremers:
Yes. And great points, right? Active share is only ever really a starting point. For example, active share is not at all a measure of skill.
Kurt Dupuis:
“Are they any good?”
Martijn Cremers:
Yeah. If you look at high active share funds as a group, you'll see a lot of dispersion in performance in that group. If you're looking for an active manager, presumably you would be looking at a fund that at least has high active share, but you need a lot more to be successful in the long term. So this framework that I use to explain how I think about what managers needs to be successful in the long term is what I call the Three Pillars Framework. So managers need Skill, Conviction, and Opportunity. Active share is related to each of these three, but doesn't directly measure any of them. So skill is multifaceted. Both skill and active share tend to be persistent over time. We find a strong relationship between the ability of a manager to repeat strong past performance and active share. It's called positive performance persistence. That positive performance persistence is much more likely for managers with a high active share.
But then, that high share managers as a group are much more likely to be able to repeat strong past performance into the future. The second thing that managers need, they also need a strong conviction. Even if you have skill to identify good investment opportunities, you still need to have a certain courage of one’s conviction to do so persistently. What I also have to hear is the notion that to be successful as an active manager in the long term, your strategy needs to be hard to implement. There need to be real frictions that prevent other managers from doing the same thing. And so successful managers in the long term need to have an investment strategy that really requires courage of one’s convictions, where you really have to go against certain frictions. The key example here for me is a patient active strategy. It's hard to be patient in an impatient world.
Kurt Dupuis:
Mm hmm.
Martijn Cremers:
Most investors in actively managed funds, they are looking at the formula of those funds regularly, and they may take money out or in, right depending on the recent performance. So if you are an active manager and you want to invest in stocks for three, five year periods, that requires real courage. That requires real strong convictions. The manager knows really well how to pick stocks that will do fine over five year periods. But even that manager may be wrong in the short term. Those stocks may go against the manager in the next one year, two years, maybe even three years.
Steve Seid:
Wait a minute. So you're telling me that those articles that come out in the publications that say year to date active management, it's not working, you're trying to tell me that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Is that what you're suggesting?
Martijn Cremers:
I'm afraid so, Steve.
Steve Seid:
Yeah. Okay, fair enough.
Martijn Cremers:
Yeah. So evaluating funds requires a longer horizon, but that also depends on the strategy of the manager. The difficulty is that the more patient the manager is, the longer the investment horizon of the manager - the really the longer the time period, you need to evaluate how well the manager is doing. If you look at the data, what you find is that most very high active share managers are not very patient. They own stocks for one, one and a half years, typically. On the other hand, most managers that are very patient that own stock for long periods of time, most of those managers don't have a high active share.
Steve Seid:
Hmmm.
Martijn Cremers:
The more rare combination, rare because it's difficult because it requires conviction, is to be both high active share and patient. That's rare because it's hard to do. And finally, assuming that there are indeed long-term investment opportunities that only patient managers can take advantage of, because it's hard to do because it's relatively few managers that are actually trying to be long-term and highly active. What we argue, what we find in our academic research is that those managers have done that to do the best among the high active share managers. So the outperformance of high active share managers we found was concentrated among the subset of high active share managers that are also patient. That's a piece we published in the paper of Financial Economics.
Steve Seid:
That's one of the most, in my mind, impactful profound charts I've seen in any of your work. Even if you're high active share and you're turning the portfolio over all the time on average, those folks, they're not worth the fee that you're paying on average. And, yet you see this one line that just kind of explodes out that manager that has this high active share that has these, I use “concentration”. There's other ways to be active share, but let's call it concentrated low turnover managers. Is that a fair statement to say, that's where the alpha lives?
Martijn Cremers:
In my research, that's the strongest evidence I found for long-term outperformance among high active share managers. Not that I want to push back against you, Steve, but.
Steve Seid:
You can please.
Kurt Dupuis:
Oh, please, please do.
Martijn Cremers:
We didn't find that the high active share managers that were inpatient underperformed. Right. That to me, that's a key distinction. So there's a lot of debates and that's actually a wonderful thing. There's a lot of debates about the evidence in some of my papers. I think what debate is really about is how robust is the evidence that high active share funds have outputformed? And I think that's very much depends on the time horizon and the subset of funds as you're looking at. If you only look at the last 10 years versus the last 30 years, for example.
Steve Seid:
Right.
Martijn Cremers:
There's not a result that I think is very robust and that is the underperformance of low active share funds. So that I think is very robust and statistically quite strong. The result of outperformance of high active share funds is less robust. At the same time, there is also very little evidence, especially statistically strong evidence over longer periods of time that as a group, high active share funds have underperformed.
Steve Seid:
Got it. So I want to talk about where people can actually find active share because when you first published this paper was this thing that kind of people were interested in, but you couldn't find it everywhere. Where do you get this statistic?
Martijn Cremers:
Yeah, the easiest way to find active share numbers for US Equity Mutual Funds is to go to our free website, Activeshare.info. So on activeshare.info, which is in partnership with Touchstone Investments for which I'm very grateful, we make our academic data, well, our calculators of active share based on academic data - available for free online, but also other measures related to how they invest, for example, a measure of how much turnover there is in these funds over longer periods of time and measures of what cap size, where is the money invested in the fund. That also helps, I think, investors to test whether or not the benchmark that the fundis - tracks to is followed to what extent that actually corresponds with the actual investment strategy of the fund.
Steve Seid:
Got it.
Kurt Dupuis:
So the first time you released this research was in 2009. Over the years you provided context about how active share has changed in the mutual fund industry over the last decades. Can you sort of paint that mosaic like were managers hire active share in the eighties and nineties versus today? Is it less? How has that picture changed over the last 30, 40 years?
Martijn Cremers:
Yeah, so our data goes back to 1980. So if you look from 1980 to today, I would say in high level summary, there's two broad threats among US Equity actively managed funds. And so if you look at the percentage of assets in the mutual fund industry in let's say funds with active share of at least 80% or at least 90%, that has just decreased over time consistently since 1980. So fewer and fewer funds over time are really high active share funds. The other trend is about really low active share funds. So really low active share funds for US Equity would be 6% or lower, for example. That was very uncommon in the eighties. Then, in the mid nineties became quite suddenly quite popular did these become, a lot of funds had low active share. And then over the last 10, 15 years, that has declined. Perhaps, due to active share being more widely available.
Kurt Dupuis:
And that's funds only, not ETFs, right?
Martijn Cremers:
That's right. So these trends are among actively managed, open-ended US Equity funds.
Kurt Dupuis:
Gotcha. Well, and I'm also curious if we just stick in the US, different cap structures, is there more utility in large versus small or small versus large in thinking about active share as a tool?
Martijn Cremers:
Great question. Yeah. This is something that I wish we had written more about in our original 2009 paper. The opportunity for the manager to have a high active share is much greater for small cap managers. Their benchmarks are much less concentrated and there are many more names to choose from. And so to give you a bit of a rough sense of how I think about it, that 80% is a really high active share for a large cap fund, but not for a mid and a small cap…
Stev Seid:
No, right.
Maritjn Cremers:
…but as high for let's say small cap, you really have to start looking at 90 if not 95% active share for a small cap fund.
Kurt Dupuis:
So we've covered, I think, pretty well three pillars that you talked about, which really were rooted in that research years and years ago. What's some of the more recent research that you're working on and finding interesting?
Martijn Cremers:
So more recently, I've written several papers that were published in the Financial Analyst Journal that were written for a much broader audience than my earlier work. One example is the paper where I introduced the three pillars framework where I summarize 10, 15 years of my academic research in that one paper. Another example is a paper we published in 2019 in the Financial Analyst Journal where we try to review 20 years of everyone's academic research on active team managed mutual funds. So think about, this is the paper where the three of us read over 500 papers so that you don't have to.
Kurt Dupuis:
Thank you.
Martijn Cremers:
We titled this "Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Active Management." A review of the past 20 years of academic literature, actively managed funds. And so the title kind of gives it away our conclusions are that the academic literature over the last 20 years is a lot more positive about the value of active management than the conventional wisdom that originated about 20 years ago has suggested. I've done a recent paper on actively managed bond funds. I've done a recent paper also published in the Financial Analyst Journal on separate accounts. What we found is that among separate accounts that are the active share, there was strong positive performance persistence. And finally too many papers. I'm sorry. Finally, we have a recent paper that we're going to make publicly available over the next couple of weeks or so we hope on ESG. So how active are managers when it comes to ESG? We introduce a metric called Active ESG share that tries to measure that.
Steve Seid:
So a couple things there. One we at Touchstone, have summarized a lot of Dr. Cremers' work. So we have publications and info that we can send you, but also if you want a copy of anything, any of his work, direct work that he's produced, reach out to us. We covered a lot of ground today and really, really appreciate your time, your partnership with Touchstone. Love talking with you. Maybe let's sum everything up here. If you were to take a step back and just talk about the broad conclusions of your research just at the high level, how would you summarize that up for folks?
Martijn Cremers:
Yeah, the broad summary I would say is that active share is a helpful tool to quickly assess how much security selection a fund is doing. And then I related it to the three pillars framework of Skill, Conviction, and Opportunity. And we talked there about patient approach with high active share as a strategy that requires strong conviction and managers need opportunity. In terms of performance, the key results is that low active share funds that are not very inexpensive, they generally have underperformed. Among the high active share managers, we don't find strong evidence for underperformance as a group. We even find for high active share managers that have been very patient, we have found some evidence that they have significantly outperformed.
Steve Seid:
Excellent. Well thanks so much to our guest, Dr. Martijn Cremers. We'll be right back with our Costanza Corner. This is The Whole Truth. Stick with us.
Kurt Dupuis:
And welcome back to the Costanza Corner where we love to end the show on a high note. Steve.
Steve Seid:
I got a good one. I'm going to tell you right upfront. This is good. Okay.
Kurt Dupuis:
I know. I could tell by the timber of your voice that you were really amped for this one. So I'm here.
Steve Seid:
So I was down at a conference in Santa Barbara, a specific firm’s conference. It was at the Ritz in Santa Barbara. If anybody's ever been there.
Kurt Dupuis:
Sick humble brag.
Steve Seid:
Yeah, well listen, it's not like I was there hanging out with my posse. It was a conference that I was invited to. So I got, bottom line is I got a discounted hotel room. Anyways, I kept running into someone who had been on Seinfeld amongst many other things. But this is the Costanza Corner, and this is going to be about George Costanza. I kept running into John Voight, remember John Voight?
Kurt Dupuis:
The pencil. Is he holding that pencil.
Steve Seid:
This is where I'm going to go with this. So what was really funny about this is it's not like, "Oh, I saw him in passing once." He appeared to be just hanging out at the Ritz a lot. I saw him every day. I don't know why. I'm not suggesting he just spends his days walking around the Ritz. All I can tell you is over multiple days, I kept running into John Voight and after…
Kurt Dupuis:
Like the episode Costanza was sold a bill of goods that it may or may not have actually been, was it him? Did you have other people? Do we have corroborating testimony that was in fact him?
Steve Seid:
Yes. And the episode you're referring to is George buys this car that's kind of out of character. And then Jerry asked him, "Well, why?" And it's because the salesperson said it was John Voight's car, right? And so that's the whole episode and it turns out….
Kurt Dupuis:
Found a pencil in the glove compartment, with, it had tooth marks on it. So they took it to a dentist who could see how they're like, 'Cause turns out it might not have been Johns Voight's car, but they had this pencil. So that's exactly right. So I saw him these bunch of times, the only thing I kept thinking of, and it was making me crack up, was "can I give him a pencil to bite on?" That's what I literally thought right? Now, so here's what happened.
Kurt Dupuis:
Can you tell me you did this. That's a wonderful idea.
Steve Seid:
I found a pencil. Pencils aren't easy to find. There's not pencils lying around. I legit found a pencil and I got to tell you, I chickened out.
Kurt Dupuis:
Oh my God.
Steve Seid:
Now here's what makes it.
Kurt Dupuis:
Are you serious?
Steve Seid:
Here's what makes it even worse that I chickened out.
Kurt Dupuis:
Oh.
Steve Seid:
I was laughing so hard, I wanted to see the episode. So what I did was I just went on. Yeah, I don't know if there was the last night I was there, I just googled John Voight and pencil. 'Cause I just wanted to see that Seinfeld clip. Well, turns out people bring him pencils all the time. If you go on the internet and you do John Voight pencil, you will see him with fans.
Kurt Dupuis:
He's doing it?
Steve Seid:
And he has pencils and everyone does this for him. To him, everyone does. So I ruined it. I should have had a better story.
Kurt Dupuis:
Steve Seid.
Steve Seid:
I screwed up.
Kurt Dupuis:
I'm mad at you. I am officially, I put it on the docket. I am mad at you. You are in the podcasting dog house. I can't believe you didn't do that.
Steve Seid:
I know, I know I screwed up. But I did laugh really hard because.
Kurt Dupuis:
That's bush league dude.
Steve Seid:
I think the funniest I ever have laughed at Seinfeld is that episode where Jerry goes into the glove compartment and finds out, "Wait, John, John has an H in his name, john doesn't spell his name Voit", and Jerry goes, "Sometimes I spell my name with a G or an I." Anyways, that's my Costanza corner. Thanks everyone for listening. See you next time.
Kurt Dupuis:
Thanks y'all. You can find The Whole Truth and subscribe for free on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. We'd love it if you took the time to rate and review the show on Apple Podcast, it helps others find the show. And for more episodes of The Whole Truth, go to www.touchstoneinvestments.com/thewholetruth. That's touchstoneinvestments.com/thewholetruth, all one word.
Disclosure:
1 Active share measures the percentage of the Fund's holdings that differ from those of the benchmark. It is calculated by taking the sum of the absolute difference between all of the holdings and weights in the portfolio and those of the benchmark holdings and weights and dividing the result by two. Index performance is not indicative of fund performance. Investing in an index is not possible. Active Share is not a performance measurement.
2 Tracking error is a measure of financial performance that determines the difference between the return fluctuations of an investment portfolio and the return fluctuations of a chosen benchmark.
3 Alpha is a portion of a fund’s total return that is unique to that fund and independent of movements in the benchmark.
Please note that this content was created as of the specific date indicated and reflects views as of that date. It will be kept solely for historical purposes and opinions may change without notice in reacting to shifting economic, market, business, and other conditions. Touchstone funds are distributed by Touchstone Securities Incorporated, a registered broker dealer and member of FINRA and SIPC.
This commentary is for informational purposes only and should not be used or construed as an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal and fluctuation of value. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Touchstone Securities, Inc. has partnered with Professor Martijn Cremers to provide consulting services. Touchstone and Professor Cremers are independent of each other.
