Have you ever heard of the professional basketball player Rick Barry? He was one of the most prolific scorers in basketball history, was inducted into the basketball hall of fame, and is the only player to lead the NCAA, ABA, and NBA in single season points per game. He still holds the record for average points per game in the NBA Finals.
But most people remember Rick Barry because of his unorthodox underhand free throw style. Barry figured something out about free throws: a higher arc on his shot increased his odds of making them. To maximize the arc of his free throws, he adopted the underhanded shooting style.
And it worked: Barry had the top career free throw percentage in the ABA (before it got folded into the NBA in 1976) and, when he retired from the NBA in 1980, also held that league's record for career free throw percentage. He's still fourth on the list of all-time career free throw percentage shooters.
Barry's style was undeniably effective, but it didn't catch on. It wasn't "cool" to shoot underhanded. Wilt Chamberlain, the most dominant player of his era, had only one weakness in his game: his free throws. Chamberlain briefly adopted the technique and his free throw percentage noticeably improved, but then he switched back to his lousy conventional shot because he was worried about how it looked. Shaquille O'Neal, a notoriously terrible free throw shooter, once said, "I told Rick Barry I’d rather shoot 0% than shoot underhand. I’m too cool for that."
Even though Barry's style was demonstrably effective, other players didn't want to do it because it didn't look cool.
So what's the takeaway? Smart, competent, and otherwise high-performing people will repeatedly fail at something when doing it the easier way isn't viewed as cool. And here's how it ties into investing:
It's a well-known statistic that in any given year, about 85% of active mutual fund managers underperform their benchmarks. What's an active mutual fund? In a nutshell, that means the fund manager buys & sells investments according to some preferred, often proprietary strategy to try to beat an objective measure (like the performance of the S&P 500, for example). That style of fund management is called active and the thing they're trying to beat is called a benchmark. And about 85% of fund managers who try to do this don't succeed.
And this isn't just last year or the year before or the last 5 years. It's ever year for as long as the statistic has been tracked.
Just to be crystal clear: these active fund managers aren't dummies who don't know what they're doing. These are smart, competent, and otherwise high-performing people tasked with managing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. It's just that the job they are trying to do is incredibly difficult. Just like it's incredibly difficult for a super tall NBA star like Wilt Chamberlain or Shaquille O'Neal to get a high enough arc with a conventional shot to reliably make free throws.
Buried within that statistic is an amazing counterpoint: ordinary investors – people just like you & me – can outperform 85% of the top professional active fund managers by just buying the benchmark. Instead of trying to beat the S&P 500, for example, you can outperform 85% of the pros who are trying to do just that by simply buying an S&P 500 index fund.
Rick Barry became an elite free throw shooter by identifying an easier way to do it, and you can join an elite class of investors by doing the easiest thing. How about that?
Even better – you and I don't need to worry about what other people think of our investing choices or prove to anyone how cool our strategies are. Instead of worrying about how we're going to outperform the market – which is incredibly hard to do – we can take a page from Rick Barry's playbook and just do the things that make it easier to succeed like buying a mix of index funds that you can own for the rest of your life.
Want to talk about your own investing journey? Reply to this email – all messages are checked by yours truly. Thanks!
Thanks,
Timothy Iseler, CFP®
Founder & Lead Advisor
Iseler Financial, LLC | Durham NC | (919) 666-7604
Iseler Financial helps creative professionals remove stress while taking control of their financial lives. We'll help identify your current strengths and weaknesses, clarify and refine your long-term goals, and prioritize decisions to improve your financial well-being now and later. Reach out today to take the first step.
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