There's a whole industry built on one sentence: follow the smart money. Screen the 13F filings, copy what the billion-dollar funds bought, borrow their edge. We run one of those screens, so we're not throwing stones — we're asking the question honestly. If the edge is real, it should show up year after year, not just in the highlight reel.
So we did to the funds exactly what we did to Congress. For every calendar year back to 2014, we cloned every 13F manager we track — their disclosed book, rebalanced when they file, no peeking ahead — held it through the year, and measured the average clone against the S&P 500 over the same twelve months. A rolling window means each year is judged against its own market: 2018's Q4 correction, the 2020 crash and rebound, the 2022 bear. "The market went up" can't do the work.
Twelve years, six wins
| Year | Funds | Avg clone | S&P | Alpha | Funds that beat the S&P |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 28 | +12.2% | +13.5% | −1.3 pt | 50% |
| 2015 | 29 | +1.1% | +1.2% | −0.1 pt | 59% |
| 2016 | 34 | +9.1% | +12.0% | −2.9 pt | 32% |
| 2017 | 40 | +26.9% | +21.7% | +5.2 pt | 63% |
| 2018 | 44 | −4.6% | −4.6% | −0.0 pt | 48% |
| 2019 | 45 | +31.6% | +31.2% | +0.4 pt | 51% |
| 2020 | 51 | +42.5% | +18.3% | +24.1 pt | 73% |
| 2021 | 55 | +16.0% | +28.7% | −12.8 pt | 25% |
| 2022 | 57 | −25.8% | −18.2% | −7.6 pt | 37% |
| 2023 | 60 | +35.5% | +26.2% | +9.4 pt | 67% |
| 2024 | 66 | +25.3% | +24.9% | +0.5 pt | 44% |
| 2025 | 71 | +20.2% | +17.7% | +2.5 pt | 56% |
Across the twelve years the average clone beats the S&P by about +1.4 points a year. Small, but positive — sounds like the edge is real. It isn't, and the table tells you exactly why:
- It's a coin flip. Cloning beat the market in six of twelve years and trailed in the other six. You don't get to know which is which in advance.
- One year is the entire edge. The +1.4 average is really 2020 in a trench coat — a +24-point COVID-rebound blowout when funds' concentrated growth books mean-reverted violently off the March lows. **Remove 2020 and the
eleven-year average is −0.6 points* — cloning loses* to the index.
- The typical fund's typical year is nothing. Forget the average, which a few home-run funds distort. The median fund's alpha sits within a point of zero in most years. Half beat the market, half don't — the definition of no edge.
- When it's wrong, it's really wrong. 2021 (−12.8) and 2022 (−7.6) weren't near-misses. The same concentrated, popular, long-duration positions that make clones look brilliant in a melt-up got taken to the woodshed when rates rose. Cloning doesn't just fail to beat the market in bad years — it amplifies the drawdown.
Skill would look different
If funds had a durable stock-picking edge, the "beat the S&P" column would hover comfortably above 50% every year. Instead it swings from 73% in 2020 to 25% in 2021 — it tracks the regime, not the roster. In risk-on years the crowded mega-cap-growth book that every clone holds wins; in risk-off years it loses. That's leveraged beta with a filing delay, not alpha.
This is the same shape we keep finding wherever we point the backtest: the legends barely match the market over a decade, the most-crowded consensus buys don't outperform, last year's best cloner rarely repeats, and — on the other side of the aisle — copying Congress is the same coin flip. Four independent tests, one answer.
So what is 13F data good for?
Not for a "clone the smart money and beat the market" strategy — that's the myth this table retires. It's good for the honest things: seeing what a manager you already admire actually owns, watching conviction build or break across quarters, noticing when a name goes from one fund to twenty. Use the filings on /funds as a research lens and a curiosity, not as a machine that turns someone else's 45-day-old homework into your edge. The edge that survives twelve years of this test is a rounding error — and it's negative without a pandemic.
Methodology: for each calendar year from 2014 to 2025, every fund we track with a full year of history is cloned from its disclosed 13F holdings (top positions, rebalanced at each filing date, no lookahead), and its return over that year is compared to the S&P 500 over the identical window. Values are equal-weighted across funds; the "beat the S&P" column is the share of funds with positive alpha that year. Earlier years carry fewer funds (28 in 2014, 71 in 2025). The clone is a model of a fund's public book, not the fund's actual reported returns. Not investment advice.