OPPapers.com

Beat The Market

http://vwww.investopedia.com/ask/answers/03/100903.asp

What does it mean when people say they "beat the market"? How do they know they have done so?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Beating the market" is a difficult phrase to analyze. It can be used to refer to two different situations:

1. An investor, portfolio manager, fund, or other investment specialist produces a better return than the market average. The market average can be calculated in many ways (some of which are shady and used to make it look like someone has exceeded market returns), but usually a benchmark like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average index is a good representation of the market average. If your returns (which you can learn how to calculate here) exceed the percentage return of the chosen benchmark, you have beaten the market - congrats!

2. A company's earnings, sales or some other valuation metric is superior to that of other companies in its industry. How do you know when this happens? Well, if a company beats the market by a large amount, the financial news sources are usually pretty good at telling you. However, if you want to find out for yourself, you need to break out your calculator and request some information from the companies you want to measure. Many financial magazines do this sort of thing regularly for you - they'll have a section with a title like "Industry Leaders." We don't suggest you depend on magazines for your investment picks, but these publications may be a good place to start when looking for companies to research.

Indexers: A Free Ride on Market Efficiency
By Don Luskin
Special to TheStreet.com
4/30/01 10:14 AM ET
URL: http://www.thestreet.com/comment/openbook/1409370.html

To: Louis Rukeyser, "Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser"
Dear Lou,
Last Friday evening, you inducted John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Funds, into the "Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser...