The news wasn’t good for money managers last month, not that they will pay attention.

New research indicated that professional money managers should shuffle off and join singer Randy Newman’s Short People.

Sad for them, I guess. (Fortunately for them, many find that high compensation with no heavy lifting offsets the futility of the work.)

The news was simple. The new research showed that making no investment changes whatsoever was vastly superior to what money managers do — make decisions that result in investment changes.

I’m serious about that “whatsoever” part.

Basically, the more decisions professional managers make, the worse their results are likely to be.

Indeed, the best investment results come from total sloth. Doing nothing. Nada.

I’m serious here. Being in a coma will improve your investment results, but a good, solid case of catatonia may suffice. Investment paralysis isn’t to be lamented. It deserves celebration.

Hard to believe, I know. We like to believe in action. Decisive action. All our heroes are action-heroes. There are not now, and never have been, any heroes of inaction.

Action heroes are far superior to indecisive, uncertain muddle-bugs like you and me.

Well, it ain’t so.

We have potential. All we have to do is become deliberate about our inaction.

In mid-April, Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig laid out research by three finance professors — Hendrik Bessembinder at Arizona State, Michael Cooper at the University of Utah and Feng Zhang at Southern Methodist University. They found, as the SPIVA studies I’ve cited many times have regularly found, that the longer the investment period, the lower the percentage of managed funds that beat a broad stock index fund like an S&P 500 fund or a total stock market fund.

They estimated that investors missed an additional $1 trillion in wealth by going with stock pickers over broad index funds.

They also found that as money managers focused their decisions on a small number of stocks, betting more on the quality of their decisions, the greater the odds their performance would trail a broad index fund. So much for brave bets and big commitments.

A few days later, Morningstar researcher Jeffrey Ptak wrote about his research testing the limits of inaction. Rather than own an index fund that changed over time, he asked how a portfolio that bought every stock in the S&P 500 would do if no replacements were made and stocks that were acquired for cash were not replaced but held as cash.

Think of it as the Rip Van Winkle portfolio. You buy the stocks, go to sleep, and wake up 10 years later. Voila! Solid sleep. Superior performance.

In the 10-year period ending March 31, 2023, Ptak found that the do-nothing portfolio was about equal to the S&P 500 index portfolio but less risky due to the accumulated cash holdings. He found similar results for 10-year portfolios ending March 31, 2013, and March 31, 2003.

Over the full 30-year period, the do-nothing portfolio provided a slightly higher return at less risk.

A few days later, Morningstar columnist John Rekenthaler wrote a follow-on piece showing just how rare that performance was. Of the 772 managed funds that started the 30-year period, only 360 survived and, of those, only 85 had a higher return than Do Nothing. But of those 85, only 8 had lower risk.

No funds had both a higher return and lower risk.

Action-oriented readers are probably asking whether any of the major fund firms have created their version of a do-nothing, investor coma, Rip Van Winkle fund. But, sadly, they haven’t.

Don’t worry. The news is out. The day is young. Wall Street is action-oriented. My bet is that we’ll see the first coma ETF by the end of summer. Perhaps we’ll see a series of them, going well beyond the obvious Rip Van Winkle and Snow White.

My crystal ball is unclear about only one thing. How much of a premium will they charge for leaving our money alone?

It’s a tough decision.

Twitter: @scottburnsSAL