Contrarian: How to get more out of your passives exposure

For right or wrong, it is an incontrovertible fact that more and more investors, as well as their advisers, are making the shift to using passive funds as part of their diversified portfolios.

However, I think they need to think long and hard about the sustainability of individual funds, especially ETFs. In the US, more and more ETF providers are choosing to cull their range of funds as assets under management fail to make the grade. Who wants to be in a small fund, about to be closed, with the potential for closure expenses charged to NAV? We also need to be thinking long and hard about liquidity and bid offer spreads on exchange-traded products – as well as whether platforms will actually provide trading access to funds. And if all that was not bad enough, the choice of inde...