Saturday, November 23, 2013

Felix Salmon - ETFs

Felix Salmon: demolishes the idea that not everyone can be passive.

"But the point at which passive investing becomes self-defeating is a bit like the point at which the gradient of the Laffer curve turns negative, and tax hikes cause revenue losses rather than revenue gains: both points are far beyond any state of the world that obtains in real-life America. Passive investors are still a minority of all stock-market investors — and, what’s more, they could easily become a majority without doing any harm to the markets’ price-discovery abilities. The only thing that matters is that there’s a reasonably large number of active marginal price-setters. Since there always will be a reasonably large number of active marginal price-setters, no one ever need fear that the rise of passive investing is going to become self-defeating."

and highlights the gains to be made from cheap and systematic investment.

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