Active Money Management Isn’t Dead Yet

There’s a line of argument in the financial press that suggests that active money management is dying, a victim of high fees and underperformance versus low-cost indexing that captures average market returns.

Newsflash: This is anything but the case. Active investing still dominates asset management around the world, and less than “18 percent of the global stock market is owned by index-tracking investors,” according to a 2017 BlackRock Inc. analysis. That is a modest share and a clear sign that active asset management still dominates the industry.