[mattangriffel]

Yeah, but also this is nothing new.

In a recent Planet Money episode (#688: Brilliant vs. Boring), they talk about how when John Bogle first introduced the index mutual fund in 1975, it got a lot of criticism (and not much adoption) with people claiming that they were "un-american" and "Bogle's folly".

It's possible that there's some sort of concentrated media push going on here, but the story hasn't changed much in the last 40 years. And I would hope that if people with a lot of money were trying to smear index funds, they'd at least come up with a new angle.

[eveningcoffee]

> It's possible that there's some sort of concentrated media push going on here, but the story hasn't changed much in the last 40 years.

My opinion is that if there exists campaign against such investment strategies, then it is possible that this has been going on quite long time already. Like the parent postulated: media campaigns are, on that scale, relatively inexpensive.

[EvanPlaice]

It's hard to extract value from the economy via short-term pump and dump campaigns when the majority defaults to diversified index funds.

Investors with heavy ingluence/ownership of media have a lot of potential to earn from manipulating market volatility.