SPIVA’s (S&P Indices vs. Active) 15th edition of their scorecard saw active managers in a wide range of asset classes overwhelmingly underperform against comparable benchmarks over one-year, three-year, five-year, ten-year periods, and fifteen-year periods. The data for the past decade and a half has included the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery, two markets in which superior management technique would have supposedly demonstrated its value. The results, however, tell a different story:
The failure of active managers to meet their index benchmarks is just one of many reasons why investors are abandoning active management for passive strategies. The chart below shows the movement of investments from actively managed funds to passively managed funds between 2007 and 2016.
While we have been proponents of passive, index-based strategies for twenty years, it is always encouraging to see others embrace an approach we know to be effective.