In fact, only 2 out of 2,862 broad domestic stock funds were able to outperform their peers consistently over five years, according to one measure: performance in the top quartile of funds over five consecutive 12-month periods ended in March 2014. That translates to just 0.07 percent of the funds, which means that more than 99.9 percent of funds fell short of that feat.
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Repeat those double flips five times and you’ll find the probability of a mutual fund ending up in the top quartile five times in a row through chance: 0.098 percent. (We’re flipping the coin twice for each year of mutual fund performance.) That’s a bigger probability than the 0.07 percent scored by the actual funds. This means that if mutual fund managers had just flipped coins, roughly three of them — not two — would have been expected to end up in the top quartile for five years in a row.
Indeed:
>>> 100 * .25 ** 5