The Marathon Fund "Beats 0050"? Switch to a Total-Return Yardstick and It Loses to the Market by a Length

Taiwan's most famous evergreen active fund loves to compare itself to 0050. But does it dare compare itself to "the real market"? We pulled the exchange's own data and measured it.

2026.06.03 ｜ Shiba the Disciplined ｜ ProfitVision LAB ｜ Active vs. Passive Series: ① U.S. → ② Taiwan → ③ The Marathon Fund (this piece) → ④ Active ETFs

Meet the Evergreen Champion

Capital Taiwan Marathon (platform code A16003) is a living fossil of Taiwan's fund industry. Let's lay out the basics:

Ten-year cumulative +441.65%, about 18.4% annualized — a beautiful number, no wonder it's the marketing champion. The question is: beautiful compared to what?

Switch to a Fair Yardstick: the Total-Return Index

The Marathon's marketing always compares it to 0050. But as Part 2 showed, Yuanta's official holdings page had a single stock — TSMC — at 57.79% of 0050 as of 2026/06/03, with the top five at about 74.63%. "Beating 0050" is essentially "betting right on TSMC," not "beating the whole market."

This is not an argument that 0050 is a bad investment vehicle, nor that 0050 cannot be compared on a total-return basis. The issue is narrower: 0050 represents Taiwan's top 50 large-cap names, not the entire listed Taiwan market. If an active fund claims it "beats the market," it should not rely only on the most familiar, most favorable, but narrower yardstick.

To fairly ask "does it have real skill," you need a different yardstick — the total-return Taiwan index (the cap-weighted total-return index). It covers all listed stocks, is market-cap weighted, and reinvests dividends (total return) — the same basis as a fund's NAV, apples to apples. It's also the kind of "real market" that international standards like SPIVA use to judge active funds.

The Duel: Marathon vs. the Total-Return Market (Same Day, 2026/06/02)

We pulled the total-return index points straight from the Taiwan Stock Exchange, aligned to the fund's exact data date (2026/06/02), computed the market's total return over each horizon, and put it head-to-head with the Marathon:

In annualized terms, the long-distance gap is even starker:

The name "Marathon" becomes the greatest irony. It wins the sprint (1–3 years), but in the real test of endurance — the marathon (5–10 years) — it loses to a do-nothing total-return market, trailing by 225 cumulative points over a decade and giving up 4.2 points a year.

Wins the Sprint, Loses the Marathon — Why?

This result isn't a coincidence; it's the inevitable extension of Part 1's "index concentration problem." Over the past few years, Taiwan's gains have been heavily concentrated in TSMC and the AI supply chain. The cap-weighted total-return index is itself that all-in TSMC bet.

Over the last 1–3 years, with the AI rally at its hottest, the Marathon kept up — even edged ahead — by leaning into tech. But stretch to 5–10 years, and the moment a manager "diversifies" to control risk (as any responsible manager must), their TSMC weight can't possibly match the index's 50%-plus. So across the long stretches when the silicon shield leads, a diversified active fund is structurally doomed to lag.

It's the same disease as the U.S. "Magnificent Seven" problem in Part 1. The only difference is Taiwan is more extreme: the U.S. has a Magnificent Seven; Taiwan has a "Magnificent One."

Why Is "Beating 0050" a Marketing Trick?

Now you see the magic. The same Marathon fund, measured with two different yardsticks, yields two opposite conclusions:

This is the "benchmark trap" running through the whole series: marketing doesn't lie about the numbers — it just picks a yardstick that flatters. "Beats 0050" sounds impressive, but 0050 is a narrow large-cap benchmark with nearly 58% in TSMC — beating it is not the same as beating the whole market.

Don't Forget That −1.74% Undertow Every Year

In the duel above, the Marathon already lost. But there's one more damage, never included yet happening every day: the expense ratio.

The Marathon costs about 1.74% a year (1.60% management + 0.14% custodian), while 0050's current fee tier is about 0.11% management fee plus 0.03% custodian fee. That's roughly a 12x cost gap. Don't underestimate about 1.6 points a year — compounded over 30 years, it quietly eats a large chunk of your final wealth. An active fund has to clear this cost hurdle before it can even talk about "winning."

So What About the Active ETFs Launched in 2025?

By now you might say: traditional mutual funds are expensive and lose to the market, but a wave of active ETFs arrived in Taiwan in 2025 — lower fees, intraday trading — won't they be different?

Next, we open up these new products. But let me state the standard up front: for Taiwan investors, "cheap" was never the point — alpha is. Paying a good manager well in exchange for excess returns is entirely fair. So the real question isn't "how low is the fee," but — can these ETFs' managers actually produce alpha? Do they fish in the small/mid-cap pool where alpha lives?

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