Why Investors Earn Less Than Their Funds, and the Small-Cap Surge

In this podcast, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp speaks with Morningstar's Jeff Ptak about which investor behaviors and types of funds are more associated with underperformance. Also in this episode:

• The Russell 2000 finally surpassed its 2021 peak.
• What's behind the small-cap surge?
• The Treasury Department has released preliminary guidance about "no tax on tips."
• The spread in yields between investment-grade corporate bonds and Treasuries is the smallest it's been since 1998.
• A lesson from the life and recent death of financial journalist Jonathan Clements: Don't delay your bucket list until retirement.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Sept. 27, 2025.

Robert Brokamp: Why investors earn less than their funds and the small-cap surge? This is the Saturday Personal Finance edition of Motley Fool Money. I'm Robert Brokamp. This week, I speak with Morningstar's, Jeff Ptak, about research which finds that fund investors earn lower returns than the funds themselves. But first, let's hit a few highlights from last week in Money. The overall stock market has spent the past year and a half hitting new all time highs. It did run into a significant speed bump earlier this year, but then rebounded and hit even higher new highs. But not all stocks have been setting new records, most notably small cap stocks, that is until recently. On September 18th, the Russell 2000 finally eclipsed its previous high set in 2021. It rose a bit higher on Monday of this past week. Then ended the week lower. But there's no doubt that smaller stocks have closed out the summer strong. Since August 1st, the Vanguard 500, which, of course, tracks the S&P 500, has returned 6.2%. The Invesco QQQ ETF, which tracks the NASDAQ 100, has returned 7.2%. Meanwhile, the Vanguard Russell 2000 ETF has returned 11.3%, and the iShares Micro-Cap ETF, which tracks the Russell Microcap Index, has returned 15.7% as of the market's close on September 25th. Now the reason for this outperformance could be just valuations. Just about any type of stock is cheaper than US large caps, especially of the growthier and techier variety. According to Yardeni Research, the forward P/E ratio for small caps is 15.7 compared to 22.6 for the S&P 500 and 30.3 for the magnificent seven. But it's also likely due to the belief that rate cuts from the Fed will benefit smaller companies which tend to rely more on credit. The companies are often too small to issue bonds, so they have to turn to banks to get loans with floating rates, which will likely head lower since the Fed cut the target for the Fed funds rate last week, as had been expected, and suggested we could see a couple of more cuts this year. For our next item, we turn to a provision of the one big beautiful bill that was passed on July 4th, and that is the no tax on tips. As is often the case, when a bill becomes law, the folks at the Treasury Department have to spend some time hammering out the details, and they recently released some preliminary regulations. For those of you who earn tips or you may have noticed how we're all asked to give tips, here's what we know about who's getting a tax break. Eligible workers will be able to deduct up to $25,000 in qualified tips per tax return. They won't need to itemize their deductions.

They can take the standard deduction and still deduct the tip income, but married folks will have to file jointly to get the deduction. Note that the deduction will just reduce federal income taxes, not payroll taxes, so Social Security and Medicare taxes. Individual states may or may not go along with Uncle Sam in offering this deduction. Eligibility for the deduction begins to phase out at an adjusted gross income of $150,000 for singles, $300,000 for married folks, filing jointly. Those limits are pretty high. Most workers will be eligible. In fact, according to the Yale Budget Lab, 37% of tipped workers earn so little that they don't even owe any federal income taxes, so this new provision won't really benefit them. Only tips that are voluntarily given are eligible. Any tip that is automatically added to a bill is not. Most jobs that regularly receive tips will qualify. If you're curious, if yours made the cut, check out the preliminary list of 68 qualifying occupations that the Treasury Department published at treasury.gov. By the way, podcasters are eligible, just saying. Keep in mind that these are proposed regulations. The final rules will be issued after a period of public comment, but they're not expected to change much, if at all. Now for the number of the week, which is 0.75%, that is the difference or spread in yields between investment grade corporate bonds and treasuries of comparable maturities. That is the smallest spread since 1998. What does it mean? Corporate bonds are riskier than treasuries, and investors normally require extra yield to compensate for that risk. The fact that investors aren't really requiring that much extra yield is a sign that they're very optimistic, perhaps even exuberant. Practically speaking, it might suggest that you should tilt your portfolio more toward treasuries if you feel that the extra yield from corporates isn't worth it, especially for bonds held outside of retirement accounts, and you pay state income taxes because income from treasuries is not taxable at the state level. But there's another possible explanation for such a narrow spread. Perhaps bond investors no longer see treasuries as safe as they used to be, and they're now getting priced closer to investment grade corporate. Next up, which investors are least likely to capture their funds actual returns when Motley Fool Money continues?

When evaluating a fund, one of the first sets of numbers you'll likely look up is its past returns, but those may not be the returns that the owners of the fund actually earned. That's one of the lessons from Morningstar's annual Mind the Gap study. Here to talk about it is Jeff Ptak, Managing Director for Morningstar Research Services. Jeff, welcome to Motley Fool Money.

Jeff Ptak: Well, thanks so much for having me. It's a real pleasure.

Robert Brokamp: Let's start with you explaining what the Mind the Gap Study is attempting to measure.

Jeff Ptak: Absolutely. The familiar total returns that you just referenced, what that assumes is an initial lump sum investment. It's made at the beginning of horizon, held to the end of the horizon. Basically, you're measuring the difference between the ending and the beginning value. Dollar-weighted returns are different. They take into account the timing and magnitude of cash flows along the way. In that sense, they're a little bit more real life. As we know, we don't necessarily go and dump all of our money in at the beginning of some horizon. We might leg in or just circumstances might lend themselves to a more regular set of cash flows in and out of an investment. What we're trying to measure with a dollar-weighted return is the return of the average dollar that's invested in a given investment. Then we can compare that to the time-weighted return, the total return that we're all familiar with, and the difference should give us a sense of the impact of the timing and magnitude of cash flows, buys and sells along the way.

Robert Brokamp: How is it calculated? I imagine it's very complicated because you looked at more than 25,000, both traditional opened and traditional mutual funds and ETF. How do you figure all that out?

Jeff Ptak: That's a great question. It's complicated in the sense there's a lot of funds, as you mentioned, to corral. But once we've corralled them, then you're really talking about three numbers; the beginning net assets of that aggregate of funds, the cash flows, so inflows and outflows on a monthly basis over the period of time that we examine, in the case of our most recent study, it was the 10 years, ended December 31st, 2024, and then the ending assets. It's what those funds held by the end, December 31st, 2024. With those three numbers, you are estimating the internal rate of return, which is a calculation that probably some of your listeners are familiar with. Through their different walks of life, it's probably most familiar in a private equity context rather than a mutual fund context. But that's the calculation that we're running to try and estimate the constant rate of return of the beginning assets, the intervening cash flows to arrive at the ending assets.

Robert Brokamp: Thirty thousand foot view here, what are the results of the most recent version of the study?

Jeff Ptak: Good question. We found that there was a little bit more than a one percentage point gap between the return of the average dollar invested in funds and those funds aggregate total returns. You do the math on that. It works out to around 15% of the total returns weren't captured. Why is that? We can only infer, but it boils down to the timing and magnitude of cash flows. I would say that if we wanted to think of it in the most caricaturized way, it's buying high and selling low as we might talk about. It can be circumstantial. There could be reasons why people buy in the quantities and at the times that they do, and it might not reflect impulse or the behaviors that we would frown upon. Could just be the situation that they're in, and things not quite going their way, and therefore, them not capturing all their fun story returns. But that's the way the math work for purposes of our most recent study.

Robert Brokamp: You say it's a little over 1%, the gap was actually specifically 1.2%.

Jeff Ptak: You got it.

Robert Brokamp: Some people might think, that's no big deal. But as you say, it reduced total return by 15%. That's over 10 years. Compound that over 20, 30 years, you're talking about not having anywhere from 20-30% as much, because the returns are lagging sometimes for obvious reasons, but sometimes it could be because people are making, shall we say, sub optimal decisions about when to get in and out of a fund?

Jeff Ptak: Exactly. It's real money.

Robert Brokamp: Let's get into some of the areas where you found the biggest gaps, starting with the volatility of the cash flows.

Jeff Ptak: There's a lot of different lenses that we look at funds through and trying to get a sense of what it is that might have been affecting investors and keeping them from capturing as much of their funds total returns as they possibly could. One of those dimensions is cash flow volatility. Basically, what you're looking at is the standard deviation of inflows and outflows to a group of funds. We grouped them from the funds that had the most volatile cash flows to those that had the least volatile cash flows. Cash flows, in this context, was proxying for trading activity. The most volatile cash flows we would associate with the most trading activity and the opposite for those that had the least volatile cash flows. What we found is, there was a meaningful difference, even controlling for a number of factors between funds that had the most volatile cash flows and those that had the least volatile cash flows, those that had the most volatile cash flow, there was a much larger gap between those funds, dollar-weighted returns and their total returns, whereas we found with funds that had more stable cash flows, investors were more successful in capturing their funds, total returns. From that inference, we can infer something else, which is the more investors do, in this case, in a transactional sense. The more buying and selling they do, the less they tended to earn of their funds total returns. If there's a takeaway there, do less, stay still, try to hold the line on transacting. Transacting is an inevitability for a lot of us. Just things happen. But what can be particularly hazardous is discretionary ad hoc trading. That's where people can really get themselves into trouble with buying high and selling low in the stereotypical sense.

Robert Brokamp: You looked at the volatility of the money that's coming in and out of the funds, but you looked at the volatility of the funds themselves.

Jeff Ptak: Exactly.

Robert Brokamp: How did that seem to correlate to the gap between the total returns and the investor returns?

Jeff Ptak: It's a real good question. It was a similar story. The more volatile a fund's returns were, the more trouble, the more difficulty investors had in capturing its total returns. If we think about it, stepping back one of the things that volatility can do is push our buttons as investors. It's not just in fleeing. It's also in certain cases, you have a volatile fund. Maybe it puts up a big number, you chase its performance. In effect, you buy high. You're buying just before performance rolls over. When you see those wider amplitudes of performance, I think that there's just a greater propensity for investors to act in ways that we might consider to be rash or inadvisable. Those funds that had them more volatile returns, there were significantly wider gaps between the dollar-weighted returns, that is, the return to the average dollar invested in those funds and those funds aggregate total returns, and in the opposite, for funds that were less volatile. Even after controlling for a number of factors, investors appeared to have more success in capturing those fund's total returns. What is that about? It's the absence of noise. It's them tending not to push buttons. There can be some other circumstantial factors that explain it, but I think, it's the main thing.

Robert Brokamp: What's interesting about what you also found is that, the more volatile equity funds did not necessarily have higher returns. In fact, on average, they had lower returns, which is the opposite of what you expect. Return and risk go hand in hand, but that's actually not what you found.

Jeff Ptak: That's right. It's one of the contradictions that you would find, at least in the context of our study. Another is seemingly having a little bit more freedom to transact, which I think in the abstract, we would think of as, that's a great thing. That people have greater ability to take control of their finances and take the decisions that they want to take at the appointed times. That didn't necessarily work to their benefit. This is somewhat tied in with the work that we did on cash flow volatility. If you look at things like ETFs, for instance, we did find that there were wider gaps with ETFs after controlling for a number of variables than there were for comparable open end mutual funds. That doesn't mean that ETFs are inferior. It just means that there can be circumstances in which investors buy and sell sub optimally, and that results in wider gaps between the return to their average dollar and those ETF's total returns.

Robert Brokamp: Let's move on to fees here. When you looked at the relationship between fees and the gap, what did you find?

Jeff Ptak: It was a little bit noisier. I wouldn't say that it was as clear cut as you found with some of the other variables, notably cash flow volatility and return volatility or even the type of vehicle open end fund versus ETF. I think this points to a number of things. You had some cross currents. One of the things that we know is that ETFs, which became a bigger and bigger part of our study universe as time went on, they tend to be cheaper, but also we saw that investors tend to transact sub optimally in them, don't earn as much of their fund's total returns as they can. The contra to that is that, you've got a number of very low cost popular funds that are commonly used in the context of a retirement plan. Think about opening an index fund that's maybe part of a target date fund that's featured in your defined contribution plan. We tended to find those types of vehicles. There were very narrow gaps there. A little bit of the cross current that's somewhat, I would say, lowered the correlation that you would have seen between expenses and the gaps between investors dollar-weighted returns and their funds total returns. It's a little bit more of a bank shot.

Robert Brokamp: Take a little detour from the Mind the Gap Study and highlight that you also have an excellent substack basis pointing, and you recently basically took a look at funds and their expenses. You broke them up into quintiles, cheapest to pricest, calculated who is more likely to outperform their category. The takeaway is pretty clear. Lower cost funds tend to do better. It's been demonstrated over and over again, but I always think it's important to reemphasize.

Jeff Ptak: You got it. I think that's excellent advice. Starting with cost is the way to go, and as you allude to, there was a piece that I ran recently. I think it was called it so simple on my substack, which you mentioned. It was almost a perfect stairstep pattern of outperformance from cheapest to priciest, even after you controlled for a number of different variables, Morningstar category asset class and the like. It really works to keep fees low on average. You're going to end up with a better result than others, even incomparable funds that charge more.

Robert Brokamp: Any other areas where you found that a larger gap was particularly interesting or instructive or maybe the other way when there wasn't much of a gap?

Jeff Ptak: Really good question. think that one of the clearest takeaways for myself and my colleagues as we've done the study over a period of years is how successful allocation fund investors have been in capturing as much of their funds total returns as possible. Allocation funds in our parlance, what does that mean? It's things like target date funds, that's probably the most popular example of an allocation fund. These are multi-asset class all in one automated strategies of some sort. Why is it investors succeeded in those whereas they maybe fell a little bit short on other types of funds. I think it's the fact that they are so automatic and they allow for hands-off investing, and so investors don't have to go in and monkey with their investments. Even things as mundane as rebalancing or adjusting your asset allocation as time goes on, your circumstances change. It obviates the need to do those things. It takes care of them for you. The less you do, the more you earn is the clear takeaway for us from the study based on what we're able to and infer from it. The other thing, and this is, again, a bit of a bank shot, but one thing that we do know about allocation funds is they tend to be used most often in the context of a retirement plan. A retirement plan, it's a gilded cage of sorts. It's really set up for people to put their money in and then leave it alone, whereas, if we're to extend that metaphor a bit, we can think of the rest of our investing outlets. That's the wild, and we're left to our own devices, and we have to fend for ourselves, and we might be more given to discretionary ad hoc trading decisions and it's a really marked contrast. You see people that are using these in that more helpful context doing better than perhaps they do in some of these other settings where they can buy and sell at will. That's been another useful takeaway for us, and I think, some readers of the study.

Robert Brokamp: I'm a big fan of using calculators, retirement tools. For example, that was the topic of our episode last week. Otherwise, how do you figure out whether you're on track to meet your goals? Whenever you use a retirement calculator or a tool like that, you have to put in some assumed rate of return. One of the recommendations of your report, and I'm just going to use a quote, "It can also make sense to build a margin of error into the return forecasts one might incorporate as part of a spending and savings plan." Talk a little bit about that.

Jeff Ptak: This might be me at my most pessimistic, I suppose, but one of the clear takeaways from doing the study over the course of a number of years, and this goes back to Russ Kennel, my colleague here, who really pioneered the research in this area. We keep finding gaps. One of the takeaways, I think, for me and perhaps, for others who read the study is, it may not make sense just to assume that you're going to earn a market rate of return. You might want to haircut that a little bit, just knowing that we, as investors, we might be given to trading in opportune times, and that might actually dampen the return of our average dollar, notwithstanding whatever market forecast we're using would suggest. Maybe take a little bit off, and it'll help you to plan in an even more clear-eyed way than, perhaps, would otherwise be the case.

Robert Brokamp: It's time to get it done, Fools, and this week, I encourage you to think about something that is on your bucket list, especially if it's something you're saving for retirement and see if there's a way you can do it sooner. I say this in light of the passing of Jonathan Clements this past Sunday at the way too young age of 62. Jonathan was a longtime personal finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal, author of nine books and the founder of the HumbleDollar website. He was one of my favorite personal finance writers, especially earlier in my career. He was just a model for how to cover the topic with wit and wisdom. He wrote about retirement countless times. How much to save, how much a retiree can safely spend to ensure their money lasts for decades? He's planned to delay Social Security to age 70, and even his plan to buy immediate annuities to mitigate the risk that he would outlive his money. Then in the summer of 2024, he found out he had a rare form of lung cancer caused by a defective gene, and he had about a year to live. He spent this past year writing and talking about how he was preparing for his passing, how he was setting up his financial and estate plans for his wife, kids, and grandkids, and how he was making efforts to enjoy life small pleasures. Jonathan Clements spent his career teaching people how to plan for retirement, but he passed away before he was able to enjoy his own full retirement. He did consider himself partially retired for several years before his diagnosis, but also acknowledged that running the HumbleDollar website was basically the equivalent of a full-time job. Fools, continue to save for retirement, and save enough for retirement that lasts a long time, but don't put off everything until retirement. Life and health are uncertain. If possible, enjoy some of your retirement goals now while you can. That is the show.

As always, people on the program may have interest in the investments they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell investments based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content, and provided for the informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Robert Brokamp. Fool on, everybody.