Index Funds and ETF's - stay close to the Exit

Index Funds and ETF's may be a wonderful choice in the eyes of many investors - individuals and institutions alike. But one aspect gets not mentioned often enough: apart from the risk that you will be fully exposed to any market decline (how good are your market timing skills?) the relentless flood of money into these instruments/strategies also pushes the already expensive component stocks to an ever higher multiple. It creates a sort of Pentium mobile or self-full filling mechanism. The higher a stock like, say, Amazon climbs, the more money is allocated to this stock - as long as people want to allocate money to the asset class, the stock market in this case.

30 reasons to love Index Funds

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/30-reasons-to-fall-in-love-with-index-funds-2014-06-04

Robo-Advisers - useful but not ultimate Solution

Robo-Advice - like the (related) growth in 'passive' investment strategies and vehicles - can be a worthwhile addition to any investor's toolbox. But the devil is in the detail - apart from the 64000 dollar question (The selection of the right investment strategy, sector etc) most Robo-Advisers (or Websites) can only cover a limited amount of available investment products. In the case of the recently-launched eVestor I notice with interest that they claim they 'invest with the largest investment companies in the world'. All very honest, but bigger is not always better!
https://www.evestor.co.uk/our-story

Passive Investing Will End In Pain

Index Investing, ETF's, commonly called 'Passive Investing' are no panacea as they mean that you will participate in any market decline to the fullest extent.
Passive Investing Will End In Pain

Active managers - not that bad

While quite a few 'active' fund managers hug the indices and charge fees as if they are trying to beat them not all is that bad as it is portrayed by some critics. Any fund manager needs to charge a fee as nothing can be provided for free. So performance really cannot be measured after fees, expenses. It is by definition a must that the universe of fund managers will under perform any index by the amount of costs loaded onto the funds they manage. Maybe these fees are rightly deemed to be too high but investors should not be brainwashed by the community of passive fund promoters. You get what you pay for, in this case the chance (hope?) that your manager will outperform the benchmark.
Bad times for active managers: Almost none have beaten the market over the past 15 years

S&P 500: World's most popular Momentum Strategy

"Indices are man-made and prone to all the same issues that anything man-made would be. The committee makes decisions about composition all the time. They add stocks at major tops and remove them at major bottoms. Framed this way, the S&P 500 can be described as “the world’s most popular momentum strategy.”

Saving the Mutual Fund Industry

Traders are paying 'extortionate fees' to short Snapchat (SNAP)

Even more amazing that irresponsible Index providers want to herd unsuspecting investors into unproven bubble stocks. It shows that 'passive' investing slavishly hugging indices is no panacea!
Traders are paying 'extortionate fees' to short Snapchat (SNAP)

Index ETF: Time to say Good Bye?

More and more commentators suggest that investors should move out of passive investment vehicles, i.e. index funds, mostly packaged as ETF's. But you should resist the lure of active mnagement and instead review your asset Aalocation.

End of Hedge Funds?

Gloom and Doom may work for Marc Faber but it should not overshadow rational analysis of the Hedge Fund Industry.
Performance comparison with the S&P means to compare apples with oranges. And there are many different strategies that all have to be looked at from a different angle.
Costs have - and continue to be - high and it is not clear why megafunds should be able to charge fees of up to - and in extreme cases more than - 2 percent and at the same time charge performance fees of around 20 percent, often without application of any reasonable hurdle rate.
What has to - and will - happen is that the structure of traditional asset management and hedge fund management will slowly get unified.
Exceptional managers may be able to receive higher fees, but even in the traditional asset management space there is a wide variety of fee levels that investors seem to be happy to accept.
Careful scrutiny will be the order of the day when looking for 'active' managers. The trend to passive investing may continue for a while longer, it will stabilise when the passive part of assets under management reaches the 60-70 percent range. Sharp competition for the remaining 40-30 percent of the asset management cake will lead to a compression of fees.
Performance fees - not only for hedge fund managers, but also for private equity and other alternative fund structures - are problematic in any case. For good reason US regulators placed severe restrictions on their use until the mid-1980s. The way they are structured gives too much of a one way option for the providers of asset management services.
It may be the end of hedge funds as we know it (Business Insider)

In Defense of Stock Picking

Stock Pickers are as good as a monkey with a dartboard. This often repeated cliche may at first seem plausible when one looks at the performance achieved by the average portfolio manager. But what would happen if all investors decide to invest in index funds? Who would cause shifts in relative valuation in the universe of investable shares? The answer is that there will always be investors who - rightly or wrongly - will try to pick the right shares. The rewards are huge in this real-world poker game. And like in the card game the winners take (absolute or relative) performance gains from the losers. And like in Poker anyone who is cognizant of his lack of relative skill is well advised to stay away from the game, unless he enjoys the thrill of the chase.