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Active manager record confidence

Jason Goepfert
2021-01-21

The NAAIM survey of active managers is getting some buzz today because it shows that the average manager is leveraged long. That doesn't happen too many times. Not only that, even the most bearish manager is 75% net long, and there is a small standard deviation among responses (suggesting group-think).

We've discussed this survey countless times since 2006, as I had a (very) small part in helping its inception. The overall conclusion is that it's just not a very good contrary indicator. Most of the time when these managers are heavily long, they're proven right in doing so.

Below, we show a version we've looked at before, which takes into account average exposure, min and max exposure, and adjusts for the standard deviation among responses. The current reading was matched only once before, the week of December 13, 2017. Other times it was almost as high mostly led to further gains.

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