Prepare for the Reversal of the Perpetual Motion Machine
“Active managers” are hedge and mutual funds that constantly trade in and out of stocks to outperform the market. The opposite of active management is (you guessed it!) passive management, also known as indexing. An index fund holds stocks from a specific segment of the market, or index. Each stock is held in exact proportion to its weight in that index. The most common form of indexing is exchange-traded funds (ETFs). If you want to invest in the S&P 500, for example, you buy the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE: SPY). As the index performs, so the fund performs. If active managers are supposed to be so good, why do they keep underperforming the market and passive index funds? And what could change that? The answer will surprise you…
