Passive Management

WHAT IS ACTIVE MANAGEMENT?

Active management might best be described as an attempt to apply human intelligence to find "good deals" in the financial markets. Active management is the predominant model for investment strategy today. Active managers try to pick attractive stocks, bonds, mutual funds, time when to move into or out of markets or market sectors, and place leveraged bets on the future direction of securities and markets with options, futures, and other derivatives. Their objective is to make a profit, and, often without intention, to do better than they would have done if they simply accepted average market returns. In pursuing their objectives, active managers search out information they believe to be valuable, and often develop complex or proprietary selection and trading systems. Active management encompasses hundreds of methods, and includes fundamental analysis, technical analysis, and macroeconomic analysis, all having in common an attempt to determine profitable future investment trends. 

WHAT IS PASSIVE MANAGEMENT?

Passive investment management makes no attempt to distinguish attractive from unattractive securities, or forecast securities prices, or time markets and market sectors. Passive managers invest in broad sectors of the market, called asset classes or indexes, and, like active investors, want to make a profit, but accept the average returns various asset classes produce. Passive investors make little or no use of the information active investors seek out. Instead, they allocate assets based upon long-term historical data delineating probable asset class risks and returns, diversify widely within and across asset classes, and maintain allocations long-term through periodic rebalancing of asset classes. 

ACTIVE MANAGEMENT IS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN PASSIVE MANAGEMENT.

Active investors must overcome many costs to match the returns of the average passively managed portfolio. These include trading costs, much higher management fees,...