Covestor just updated their investment model for sharing portfolios - basically for the convenience of mirroring a model investor's portfolio, you pay fees for the brokerage for commission, to Covestor for the platform and the model investor for sharing his portfolio.
I must admit that I did consider sharing my portfolio, but realize that nobody will bother to mirror my trades anyway - but hopefully this pipe dream of a secondary source of income might one day be realized. Personally, I am still not convinced that my returns are better than the market indices, especially with such short history (1 year+). In fact, consider this my fair warning to all: It's really hard to beat the market, and you do want to know if your fund manager exhibits skill?
As one of our readers wrote of another piece, "All the math made my head hurt." Sorry about that -- I suspect that this piece falls into the same category. So here's the Cliff's Notes version: Out of over 400 diversified funds studied during the 1987-97 period, by definition half showed above average performance, but in almost all cases it seemed likely that this was due to random variation, and not skill. In only one case was there unequivocal statistical evidence of skill. When the same tests were applied to major league batters, abundant evidence of skill was found.
By way of comparison, consider the best performing mutual fund for any given year. Such funds tend to do somewhat better than average the next year, but no better than average in following years. In contrast, in every case the National League batting champions demonstrated strong statistical evidence of skill in the 11 year period following their batting crowns. Put another way, batting performance persists, mutual fund performance does not.