The missing 3% has a name: the behavior gap is the difference between the return a fund actually earns and the lower return its investors actually receive, caused by buying after markets rise and selling after they fall.
The math behind it
A fund's reported return assumes you bought at the start of the period and held straight through. Your personal return depends on when you put money in and when you took it out.
When markets have risen for two years, fund inflows spike — new investors pile in at high prices. When markets drop sharply, outflows spike — investors exit at low prices. The result: the average dollar invested captures less than the fund's time-weighted return.
DALBAR's annual Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior has tracked this gap in US mutual funds for decades. The gap is consistently 1–4 percentage points per year across asset classes. Compounded over 20 years, a 3% annual gap is the difference between $1,000 growing to $5,743 versus $3,207 — a 44% reduction in real wealth.
This is not a fringe finding. The gap has been observed in US equities, fixed income, global funds, and in equivalent studies in Europe and Asia. The cause is not fees, not taxes, not manager underperformance. It is timing.
Why it happens
Three biases drive the gap:
1. Recency bias. Investors extrapolate recent performance. A fund up 40% looks like proof of quality; a fund down 30% looks like proof of failure. Both interpretations ignore mean reversion.
2. Loss aversion. Losses register roughly twice as painfully as equivalent gains register pleasurably. Volatility feels unbearable on the way down even when the long-run expectation is positive. Investors exit to stop the psychological pain, not because the investment case changed.
3. Action bias. Doing nothing when prices fall feels irresponsible. Selling — any action — feels like a decision made rather than a mistake absorbed. The action costs money; the inaction would not have.
A concrete example
Consider a fund that posts these annual returns: −30%, +40%, +20%, +15%.
The compound return over four years is approximately 26% total, or about 6% annualized.
Now consider an investor who reads about the 40% year, invests at the start of year three, panic-sells during a drawdown in year four at −10%.
That investor's four-year experience: bought at the peak of year two's enthusiasm, captured part of the +20% in year three, then sold early in year four at a loss. Their personal return is around +8% total — while the fund compounded to +26%.
Same fund. Opposite experience.
Why it matters
The behavior gap matters because it means fund selection is not the primary problem for most investors. A low-cost index fund earning 8% annually is not useful to someone whose personal return is 4% because of repeated timing mistakes.
Two implications follow:
- Process beats selection. A sound investment policy — documented rules for when you add, rebalance, and withdraw — eliminates discretionary decisions at exactly the moments you are most behaviorally compromised.
- Conviction requires a thesis. Investors who wrote down why they own what they own before a drawdown are measurably more likely to hold through it. The thesis gives you something to evaluate against evidence, rather than against a falling price.
Try this
Before your next investment decision — buy, sell, or rebalance — write one sentence answering: what would change my mind about this? If you cannot answer it, the decision is driven by emotion or recency, not by a defensible thesis. JustJot.ai's decision journal is built for this: a timestamped note with your thesis and your stated disconfirmation criterion, so you have something to evaluate against when the market gives you a reason to panic. The behavior gap is 1–4% per year. A journal entry takes two minutes.