The point is those that bought into the Global fund prior to...

The point is those that bought into the Global fund prior to COVID are likely never making that money back against the index because of the mistakes of management over the past 18 months. You can skirt around it all you like and say "nobody knew" but they did and the index went up, which by definition means the consensus take was leaving money in the market. The majority of the industry held through the crisis or bought back in as the market rallied on information regarding the macro environment.

Even without a vaccine and even with the entire global population getting COVID, anyone with a brain could acknowledge that permanent lockdowns for five years let alone a decade wouldn't be sustainable. I would also say anyone with a brain could forsee the actions of reserve banks globally and the historical short term effects of stimulus on the market.

Also you mention that they consistently outperformed the index. Yes, by 1-3% typically each year. The problem is they have underperformed by 19% on the current yearly which translates to decade long UNDERperformance, not including fees of 1-2%. So in other words, people have significantly underperformed if they have held over the ten year period. In the past few months they have again underperformed by a few percent, virtually an entire years worth of what they need to achieve in outperformance.

To be clear, they aren't having a 17% outperformance to make up for the mistakes of last year any time soon. At best it will be a few percent and that would take a full decade of outperformance to move back into positive territory after fees.

You also don't seem to understand what I said about their cash position and allocations. If they sell the downside and miss the upside with a heavy cash position, they are PERMANELTY at a disadvantage to an index. That cash isn't going to magically be worth more next year, assets are more expensive not less expensive, not only did they miss the upside but equity assets cost significantly more than the previous year.

On the "slow growth period" touted by the Magellan team quite frankly it sounds like excuses for lacklustre performance and a desire to not overpromise. There's no intelligent reason to assume this by default to be the case.