Mutually Assured Destruction

There is no whining in baseball. Well, that's a paraphrase. Situationally, there is not much that financial quants can tell you worth knowing.

Yet, another story.

Look more closely at those gaudy returns, however, and you may see something startling. The truth is that very few professional investors have actually managed to outperform the rising market consistently over those years.

It's not a complete condemnation, though,

The data in the study didn't prove that the mutual fund managers lacked talent or that you couldn't beat the market. But, as Keith Loggie, the senior director of global research and design at S.&P. Dow Jones Indices, said in an interview last week, the evidence certainly didn't bolster the case for investing with active fund managers.

All those thick books on financial engineering and academic papers? There are better ways to exercise your quant muscles.