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
City of London skyscrapers including the Gherkin — the financial district reshaped by Big Bang in 1986, after which stock picking became a structurally losing game as research shows only 3.1 per cent of UK stocks generated all the market's real wealth over 50 years
Sunday Times columnist Ian Cowie's Apple ten-bagger makes a great story, but is it evidence that stock picking works? His own readers want benchmark comparisons — and the data is firmly on their side.
Robin Powell
Feb 24 min read
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