In Chapter I, the young Livingston works at a quotation board and keeps a notebook of price movements. Before his first small Burlington speculation, he compares a suggested trade with his own observations. The episode presents speculation as an attempt to test an idea, although his early success soon encourages larger bets.
A written forecast creates a record that memory cannot quietly improve. But noticing a repeated pattern is only a starting point: a small sample, selective recall, or a changing market can make an apparent edge disappear. An investor can adopt the discipline of recording reasons without copying Livingston’s speculative position sizes.
Worked example
Imagine ten recorded decisions: four gain $150 each and six lose $120 each. The total is $600 − $720 = −$120 before costs. Remembering the four exciting wins would produce a very different impression.
Case connection
SPIVA’s approach to retaining funds that disappear addresses the same question: what observations are missing from the story? A notebook that records only winners makes the same selection error as a fund comparison that excludes failures.
SPIVA: include the missing funds
Source-grounded facts
SPIVA evaluates the whole starting opportunity set, including funds that disappear, to address survivorship bias.
Context
Fund-performance comparisons can quietly change when unsuccessful funds close or merge. SPIVA’s published methodology addresses that problem by retaining the starting opportunity set.
Outcome
Including disappeared funds reduces survivorship bias. It does not make every benchmark choice perfect; it makes the population being evaluated more explicit and harder to improve by hindsight.
Further analysis
This is a method, not a single market crash
SPIVA is a family of scorecards comparing active funds with relevant benchmarks. The case in this library concerns the published methodology, especially its treatment of funds that disappear. It is not a claim that one performance percentage applies to all countries, asset classes, or years. The question is how to construct a comparison that does not quietly become more flattering when part of the original population vanishes. That question is also relevant to trading journals and stories about celebrated investors.
The missing-fund problem
A fund can close or merge, leaving it absent from a list of products available today. If a researcher starts with today’s list and looks backward, the comparison can exclude part of the experience faced by someone choosing at the start of the period. The remaining funds may not represent the original set of opportunities. SPIVA addresses survivorship bias by retaining the starting universe. This is a rule about the population being measured; it is not an accusation that every fund closure indicates misconduct or failure.
The denominator changes the story
Consider a clearly hypothetical group of 100 starting funds. If 20 disappear, evaluating only the remaining 80 answers a different question from evaluating the full original group. Knowing that 30 of the survivors beat a benchmark would still not, by itself, tell you how every original fund fared or how the disappeared funds should be classified. You need the methodology and their outcomes. The arithmetic illustrates the selection problem, not an actual SPIVA score for any market. No invented percentage is presented as a reported finding.
A benchmark is part of the question
A fund’s result is meaningful relative to an appropriate alternative and a defined horizon. Differences in market exposure, asset class, currency, and mandate can affect which comparison makes sense. Avoid comparing a deliberately different risk profile with an unrelated index and then interpreting the gap as pure skill or pure failure. The existence of a published methodology helps make these choices visible, but it does not remove the need to read the scope and qualifications of the particular scorecard being discussed.
Bring the method back to your own decisions
A notebook containing only successful trades has the same structural weakness as a fund list containing only survivors. Record decisions before outcomes are known and retain the uncomfortable entries. When studying a famous investor, ask what happened to comparable investors who are no longer mentioned. This does not mean success is always luck or that analysis is useless. It means the claim becomes more informative when its sample, exclusions, costs, and comparison rule are visible to the reader.
Common misconception
“Today’s successful funds are the full set that an investor could originally choose.” That silently drops funds that disappeared. A current product list and the original opportunity set are not the same dataset.
- The comparison identifies the eligible fund universe at the beginning of the evaluation period.
- It accounts for funds that disappear rather than comparing only those still present at the end.
- It also uses relevant benchmarks and reports results over specified horizons.
Try it
Write one investment claim, the evidence that supports it, and the observation that would disprove it. Date it before you know the result.