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How much passive investing is too much?
Warnings that index funds have broken the stock market all imply a threshold: a share of the market at which price discovery fails. Nobody making the argument names it. Owen Lamont, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal, argues that no such number exists short of complete passive ownership, and that what actually determines whether prices stay informative is who is left doing the trading. His case, the strongest peer-reviewed research against it, and what the performance
Robin Powell
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Semi-liquid private credit funds are facing their first real test
Through 2026, retail investors in semi-liquid private credit funds tested their promised liquidity — and lost. New research reveals why the quarterly gates designed to prevent panic actually create it: because meeting redemptions imposes costs on those who stay, everyone has an incentive to run first.
Robin Powell
Jul 88 min read
Past performance is better at spotting losers than winners
Investors instinctively turn to past performance when choosing funds. But new Morningstar research on 6,003 European funds finds it is far more reliable as a warning sign than a buy signal.
Robin Powell
Jun 293 min read
Sector rotation: would seeing it coming make you rich?
A sharp sector rotation has swept the US stock market, and the instinct is that a clever forecaster could have called it and cashed in. But experiments by Elm Wealth — first with finance graduates handed tomorrow's headlines, then with leading AI models — suggest that even perfect foreknowledge rarely makes an investor money. The deciding factor turns out to be not foresight but how much you choose to stake.
Robin Powell
Jun 279 min read
The World Cup stock market effect: Is it an actual thing?
The World Cup is a genuine, enormous attention shock — Wikipedia traffic spikes eightfold during the final. Yet a new working paper finds the World Cup stock market effect barely registers in the deep, global markets that carry most of the world's money, and shows how two ordinary ways of measuring it can conjure the effect out of nothing. Where the distraction does bite is among retail investors trading on the noise — the people the original studies never quite looked at.
Robin Powell
Jun 258 min read
Do ESG funds actually have much impact?
Buying an ESG fund is widely assumed to change corporate behaviour. New research from Drexel University and the University of Texas at Dallas finds that most ESG funds have little measurable impact — but a committed minority, with a genuine financial incentive to engage, drives real improvements in the companies they hold. The difference lies not in what a fund owns but in how it behaves as an owner.
Robin Powell
Jun 237 min read
Chasing returns: seven decades of evidence on why investors get it wrong
Two investors can study the same rising market and reach opposite conclusions about what comes next. A new MIT working paper spanning 68 years finds that only the contrarian, sophisticated forecast has ever reliably predicted returns, while the bullishness of ordinary investors — the instinct behind chasing returns — predicts little or points the wrong way. Here is what seven decades of evidence say that feeling is really worth.
Robin Powell
Jun 227 min read
The 'biggest market anomaly ever found' — and why you still can't beat the market
A new working paper has documented the largest price inefficiency ever found in the stock market: a pure-news signal with a Sharpe ratio of 3.1, more than double any known factor. But the researchers used a frontier AI model, millions of news articles and institutional trading costs to find it — and the same evidence that shows markets are inefficient also shows why an ordinary investor still can't beat them.
Robin Powell
Jun 199 min read
The hidden price of financial advice for women
The wealth management industry thinks it has a marketing problem with women. The evidence points to something costlier: women are charged more for the same products, are more exposed to the underperformance that erodes a portfolio over time, and live longer for that drag to compound. A look at what the research says about the financial advice women receive, and what advice built around the life it has to fund would do differently.
Robin Powell
Jun 166 min read
US stock market dominance and the lesson from Britain
The United States now accounts for about 62 per cent of world stock market value. The last market this dominant was Britain in 1900, not America — and Britain's owners were rewarded through a century of decline, while Japan's were made to wait 34 years to break even. The difference was not size but the price paid at the peak. A look at what the long-run evidence says about US stock market dominance, and what it means for a globally diversified investor.
Robin Powell
Jun 138 min read
Why active funds underperform even when the manager picks well
The managers running the biggest active funds picked stocks that beat the market in 2025 — and most still lagged their benchmark. A Morningstar do-nothing experiment and a body of academic research explain why active funds underperform even when the picking is good: skilled buying undone by poor selling, the hidden cost of trading, and the incentives that keep managers churning. The UK evidence points the same way.
Robin Powell
Jun 87 min read
Cognitive surrender: what AI is doing to investors' judgment
AI now sits beside roughly a third of British retail investors as they make money decisions. New research from Wharton, MIT and a Nobel laureate puts a number on what it's doing to their judgment: confidence rises by nearly 12 percentage points, even when the AI is wrong half the time. The researchers call it cognitive surrender — and the investors most prone to it are the ones least likely to notice.
Robin Powell
May 288 min read
How often should you check your investment portfolio?
How often should you check your investment portfolio? Probably far less often than you do. The 56/44 daily split of up and down days in the stock market, combined with the human tendency to feel losses twice as keenly as gains, means daily checking is almost mathematically guaranteed to make you miserable. Ben Carlson's new book Risk & Reward sets out the evidence — and the practical moves that protect long-term investors from their own short-term instincts.
Robin Powell
May 228 min read
The best investing book for UK readers in 2026 just got better
The second edition of the award-winning How to Fund the Life You Want is published today. Most personal finance books are designed to be read. This one was designed to be used. Robin Powell explains why the best investing book for UK readers in 2026 doesn't just explain investing – it asks the reader to do something about it, with a free workbook, six rules and a foreword from the Financial Times' Consumer Editor Claer Barrett.
Robin Powell
May 147 min read
Why your inflation hedge protects against the wrong kind of inflation
New research from the *Review of Financial Studies* covering 56 years of data and eight asset classes shows that the popular inflation hedge — shares, gold, property funds, commodities — only protects against energy inflation. The slow, grinding core inflation that actually erodes purchasing power year after year goes unhedged. Here's what the data say, why the investment industry hasn't fixed it, and what to do instead.
Robin Powell
May 118 min read
The church of active fund management: what fund managers really believe
A new academic study reveals what active fund management really sounds like behind closed doors. King's College London professor Crawford Spence interviewed 28 senior fund managers and found an industry that runs on faith rather than evidence — privately conceding it overcharges and underperforms, and now pivoting to retail investors as institutional clients leave. Here's what they say off the record, and how to stop paying for someone else's faith.
Robin Powell
May 78 min read
Who really benefits when private equity buys your financial adviser?
Financial advice consolidation in the UK has put private equity in control of hundreds of firms. Here's what vertical integration and hidden conflicts mean for your money.
Robin Powell
May 57 min read
The star manager myth: how a phantom stock-picker beat the market
The star manager myth, exposed: a portfolio with no manager beat the NASDAQ by nearly double. The trick that explains real star managers too.
Robin Powell
May 28 min read
The disposition effect: why losing investors keep getting worse
New research on the disposition effect shows losses make investors sell winners faster and cling to losers harder. Here's how to break the cycle.
Robin Powell
Apr 247 min read
AI can predict 71% of what your fund manager does
Most fund manager AI systems operate on autopilot, closely tracking the index while charging premium fees for active management. If your portfolio is essentially running itself, why are you paying someone to sit in the cockpit?
Robin Powell
Apr 209 min read
Why gold's inflation hedge fails in a crisis
Gold is the world's most popular inflation hedge — and one of the least reliable. Drawing on 126 years of data and the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis, this article examines why the gold inflation hedge fails precisely when investors need it most, and what actually protects purchasing power instead.
Robin Powell
Apr 138 min read
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