Gosling's Grouse: Caveat emptor on passives

Better understanding of passives required

I would like to think the active versus passive debate is an old and tired one, but I suspect some will carry on fighting the 'battle' long after everyone else has moved on.

The battle, if you can even call it that, is long over as far as I am concerned, and there is no winner. The plethora of surveys which seem to suggest active management does not work have become a bit tiresome, because implicitly they all suggest 'passive' management does work. Contrarian Investor: Could passive providers do more to protect investors' interests? Of course, it requires only a basic understanding of how an index and plain vanilla ETF works to know that they cannot outperform or beat their underlying indices. And they cannot even perform exactly in line with an index ...