It’s not about active or passive, but about costs
The study goes on to show that when passively managed funds are compared to these competitively priced actively managed funds, there is no economically meaningful difference in performance between active and passive.
The author concludes that as long as investors are cost conscious in their fund selection process, the active versus passive choice is basically irrelevant. We think these results make a lot of sense, and that investors should indeed focus on costs instead of taking a dogmatic stance in the highly polarized active versus passive debate.
1 Nanigian, ‘The Historical Record on Active vs. Passive Mutual Fund Performance’, working paper, 2018.
Our researchers publish many whitepapers based on their own empirical studies; they also follow quantitative research done by others.
