Lately we’ve fielded a lot of questions about fund fees. It seems both advisors and clients alike are finding fee disclosure confusing and there’s a lack of clarity around what investors are actually paying. This can become even more of a challenge for long/short equity funds.

The intent is always good, but sometimes it comes with unintended consequences, this is the lesson from the well-known Cobra Effect. Dating back to the British rule of colonial India, the British government tried to reduce the number of venomous cobra snakes in the country by offering a bounty for every dead cobra. While their intentions were positive, their efforts backfired, when people began breeding cobra to collect a bounty later. When the program sponsors got wind of this, the program was canceled causing breeders and would-be bounty collectors to release their snakes further increasing the cobra population.

In a recent article, Morningstar analyzed the performance of long/short equity funds, and concluded that while many managers in the category exhibit stock-picking skill, that skill has been insufficient to make up for the fees. Fair enough, but what caught our eye wasn’t the conclusion, but rather the methodology employed to assess skill: multi-factor regression analysis using the Fama-French factor returns.