“Know what you own, and know why you own it.” – Peter Lynch
Money flowed into passive investment vehicles at an ever-increasing rate in 2017. It was a record year for these products designed to replicate a stock market index and agnostically own a basket of securities without discretion. As investors who build our portfolios from the ground up through careful security selection, we think the ramifications of this passive ideology should be revisited, as we believe its impact will be felt in our markets for the foreseeable future.
First, here’s the picture from Morningstar showing the $685 billion that moved into passive indexes last year (orange bars), some of which was at the expense of actively managed funds (green bars), followed by a graph of flows into passive since 2006:
