[perl4ever]

I agree that said experts probably don't know enough to justify their cost.

But if the conclusion one draws is that the US large cap stock market is the place to put your money for the next 100 years just because it was great the last 100 years, I think that's the wrong lesson. Of all the markets in all the countries in the world, and all the asset classes, the US stock market has been an outlier for a long time, and it can't continue forever. Like Moore's law, and declining interest rates, and population growth, every trend stops somewhere since it would otherwise eat the world. Generally right at the point almost nobody is left to bet against it.

There is no such thing as completely passive management - someone at least selects components of an index, and you at least choose which index and that is always going to be pivotal with respect to investment success. I don't think there is logically any way around some degree of deliberate selection of assets. All people can do is pay less for the illusion of expertise.

[mikeash]

Isn't that last sentence the whole point, though? I thought that index funds didn't generally do better than actively managed funds in terms of raw returns, they just didn't do much worse, and the vastly lower fees mean that you come out ahead overall. The point of an index fund isn't to attain some sort of stock picking nirvana where nobody's really picking anything, it's just to get a fee of 0.04% instead of 2%, or whatever.

[e12e]

One could be cynical, and observe that US business interests have the world's largest, most agressive and equipped intelligence and military force protecting its interests - it can be an outlier just as long as a robber baron can...

Or one could be even more cynical, and observe that China appears to be pouring "hard" power behind decades of "soft" power build-up...