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
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
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