The report is extremely dry but it's not really loaded with jargon. Do you expect to be able to analyze it for what went wrong...? You may be misleading yourself about "deeper" knowledge.
The answer isn't in the report. 2016 could have been terrible. But, it wasn't. If you really want to know all the terms and such, you could just look up what it takes to get a broker's license and take finance and investment banking courses. But mostly the report is "here's what we thought we could do, and here are the minute details of our categories, and here's how much people got paid and how much money was in the fund every 30 minutes for the last ten years." But, it doesn't really show how they threw away their results, just that they had a really complicated plan for getting them.
I guess the answer is, kind of, in the report:
Based on values on June 30, 2016, the Combined Funds
returned 5.3 percentage points above the CPI over the last
20 years and returned 0.2 percentage point above the
composite index over the past 10 years.
In other words, the fund's objective, which was to beat an index fund weighted similarly to how their fund allocations were set up, was a task they met with a clownishly complex scheme (only the results of which, not the decisions) are detailed in the report. They beat the index they considered their competition by ZERO POINT TWO PERCENT over the last ten years. So, the dozens of financial advice firms and probably hundreds of people making money off this "plan" added nearly irrelevant value in exchange for gobs of money (for a net significant loss in value).
Hiring investment bankers is like hiring a gambler who is down $60 at the $20 blackjack table to make you a winner, then handing over your cash. He has to beat his own negative before he can make you any money, so not only does he have to be good to get you returns, he has to be better than you. Unfortunately, that's even harder for him, because every Mustachian is issued a slot machine that lands Triple Vanguard every time you pull the lever after putting in a dollar, and it spits out $1.07.
For a very quick tutorial on how silly "deeper knowledge" quickly becomes, try looking up "Elliott Wave Theory" on Youtube. It seems pretty simple. The market tends to move in waves, ok. The market reacts to wave interruptions of a kind of magnitude bucking a trend, and third time's a charm - that's the "marker" for the end of that trend. Ok, this sounds really easy. And that's it, ta daaa! So what's the problem? Well, the wave goes forward indefinitely, so you don't really know how the wave is going to play out, or at what segment of the wave you are, because you don't know the timetable of the wave you're on... because it doesn't end. "Hey, we found an event more than once on this infinite line, alert the news!"
You start with a simple plan and "deeper" knowledge is usually elusive. But there are intensely complicated plans for "figuring this out" (like this very long report) that frequently do worse than Lazy Portfolios and have 10x the fees. In short, in-depth investment plans are like in-depth plans to win the lottery "because it's Tuesday and .01% more people won on Tuesdays." This plan invested in Apple and GE and other megacaps, a bunch of stable junk for stability (it is a pension fund after all), and it made virtually no returns by chasing big returns.
The deeper knowledge is this:
To get rich REALLY fast, make a hugely leveraged bet on a single company. If this doesn't work, you will probably go bankrupt, which will happen most of the time.
To get rich somewhat quickly, do not do the above at all, and just invest in index funds.
