Sure, there are funds like the Vision Fund or boutique stat arb funds who still trade individual names, but these are absolutely dwarfed by the size of investments into entire baskets/etfs. The companies in S&P 500 see more liquidity that the entire rest of the US equities combined. And inside that 500, the top 50 again sees more trading than the entire 450 rest combined.
So what happens when the market sells off? Everything becomes correlated. All the idiosyncratic effects are overpowered by the overall selling pressure. There'll be companies hit more than others, but there'll be very few (basically none) big names that will weather the storm completely unscathed. This is the effect of being included in the top 1000-2000 companies in the US. The moment your company gets there, you have to accept that in a crash, your stock will do the same as everything else.
This behavior also ties back to a broader effect in financial markets, namely that in a market stress, correlations spike. All stocks fall, bonds tend to appreciate (hence stocks and bonds become negatively correlated), by definition, volatility goes up everywhere.
I have no number to substantiate this hunch but I believe that that was one of the main reasons why Boeing's shares continued to still remain at a reasonable level even after the MAX debacle, even though under normal circumstances its shares should have seen at least a 50-60% nose-dive immediately after the first signs of corporate malfeasance.
But when almost every big pension fund on the planet has to purchase your shares because it's included in a big index that will never fail of course that the stock market won't "punish" despicable moves like the one committed by Boeing.
Nothing happens. This was examined during the Q4 2018 almost-bear (19.5<20%) market: I am not aware of any data showing that index investors sell off their holdings during these types of events.
Do you have any such data?
I would hazard to guess we'll see something similar for Q1 2020 fund flows: either neutral or net inflow.
The evidence appears to suggest otherwise.
In the previous almost-bear (19.5<20%) of Q4 2018, there were net inflows into index funds.
* https://www.morningstar.com/insights/2019/01/28/us-fund-flow...
While a bit self-serving, Vanguard showing that index funds are not a factor:
* https://www.vanguardcanada.ca/individual/articles/education-...
Indexes are today's CDSes, it baffled me how many people were defending them (in fact, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people still defends them in one way or another) when in fact it had been visible for at least 3-4 years that they're the new "too big to fail" thing that will bring the whole edifice down at the first signs of weakness. We never learn, we always like to think that there's some silver bullet in finance that will make us earn money almost for ever with close to no risks.
I'm not necessarily saying that either of these will happen, but there is risk.
PE ratios are in the normal range.
How do you justify your position?
What are you comparing it to? RE? RE isn't passive.