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Comment by fiachamp | Hacker News Reader

I would add another factor lots of people overlook: the trend towards index investing. In the past, asset management involved actually analyzing the performance of a business, now it’s just trillions of dollars allocated merely by market cap. Index investing makes everyone QEs bitch - the end game for it is what we’re about to experience.

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How do you thinking the individual underlying shares of an equity index fund are valued? The performance of a company is analyzed, and market participants buy or sell shares and derivatives based on their analysis. You can make the argument that an over-reliance on indexing leads to less price discovery, but I don’t buy it.

The people shrieking the loudest about passive indexing are active fund managers.

Managed versus index is to me, open source versus closed source.

With managed funds, you have lots of participants out there eyeing the value of businesses. Everybody can make a buck by taking a peek.

With Index funds, we all have to trust that S&P is doing the right thing.

> With Index funds, we all have to trust that S&P is doing the right thing.

No, you don’t. Here is the document that outlines how the S&P 500 is calculated: https://us.spindices.com/documents/methodologies/methodology...

> Managed versus index is to me, open source versus closed source.

This is also backwards, indices are transparent and open while managed funds are not.

That's exactly right: index investing is more like a mix of a pyramid scheme and central planning. It's decoupled the stock market from the underlying economic activity.

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