Bill Miller's amazing track record?

Truly one of the greatest investors of all time.

• Miller's Legg Mason Vakue Trust fund has beaten the S&P 500 every year since 1991
• Over 15 years, it achieved an average annual rate of return of 15.8% compared with 11.9% for the S&P 500 benchmark
• Miller's fund grew from $750 million of assets in 1990 to over $21 billion in 2006
• Manu Daftary, who has the second-longest streak of beating the S&P 500 at eight years, is also struggling - up only 5.6%

How does the Visible Investor see this performance?

• Beating the market is not easy or probable - only 2 professional managers out of thousands have done it consistently for 8 years or more
• Year to date, Bill Miller's Legg Mason Value Trust had a total return of 5.9%, trailing the 15.8% gain of the S&P 500
• Most people didn't recognize Bill Miller's outstanding performance unitl the most recent 5 years, a period in which he under-performed the market
• If you took away his 3 best years of market beating performance, his results would be only slightly better than the S&P 500
• Shares of Legg Mason (the public investment company that Bill Miller works for) have declined 20 percent this year

Seeing the future...

• As indicated by the facts above, their are very few professionals that consistently beat the market, and there is no reason to think that will improve in the future.
• If the professionals with all their resouces can't beat the market, there is little chance that the individual investor can either beat the market or pick a fund that can.

• The individual investors best investment is to buy the market in a low cost index fund, where he would have beaten Bill Miller (and 94% of professional and individual investors) over the last 5, 3 and 1 year periods.

If you'd like some Visibility into your portfolio, find out more about Visible Investing.