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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.

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.

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.

Terry Smith blames index funds for Fundsmith's five-year slump — but international market data, factor analysis, and 2024's high-dispersion conditions tell a different story. Here's what the evidence actually shows.

The investing industry gives the impression that beating the market is all about skill, but the evidence tells us it's largely a game of chance This is the third article in our 12-part series on Mark Hebner's "Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors." Missed the previous steps? Catch up here on Step 1 and Step 2. If Nobel Prize-winning research wasn't enough to convince you that active investing is futile, perhaps the brutal statistics on stock picking

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has investors on edge — but does more uncertainty mean it’s time to abandon passive funds in...

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has announced initiatives to stimulate UK economic growth in the Spring Statement. Although the details have yet...

Yes, annual management fees for actively managed funds are far higher than they are for index funds. But it’s the linked costs of active funds that people don’t consider, and those can be even more significant. Anyone who uses so-called budget airlines will be familiar with what economists call linked costs, or junk fees as Americans tend to call them. Linked costs are secondary expenses that arise as a result of buying a primary product or service. So, for instance, you