More has been written on the active versus passive debate than probably any other issue facing investors. Every day people are coming up with different theories as to why one is better than the other.
John Clifton Bogle, who died in 2019 at the age of 89, may not have been a household name in Ireland, or even in his native country, the United States. But he was a true legend in the world of investing.
A perennial temptation for investors is the urge to quit the market at the top and to get back in at the bottom. While the lure of market timing sells millions of books and is standard fodder for financial TV shows, the reality rarely lives up to the promise.
The classic 2002 book ”When Genius Failed” tells the true story of a hedge fund, run by a supremely confident Wall Street bond dealer who with the help of two Nobel laureate economists thought he had cracked the code to make millions in the markets.
Have you noticed that everybody is an expert nowadays? Every opinion is deemed as valid as every other and people, at least in their own minds, quickly ascend to savant status on the basis of reading a feature article on their favourite topic.
It seems every time you open a newspaper, you’re bombarded with the often competing views of equity analysts, economists and other pundits about the right level for stocks, the likely winning and losing sectors and what policy changes might mean for the market.