[pedrocr]

This seems quite easy to fix. Just give me the option of voting my shares in the underlying companies of the index funds I own. I just want to own the market average but I'm happy to be an activist investor in the decisions I happen to care about.

Index funds may even want to differentiate themselves by having good research teams to advise me on what to decide and having convenience options where I get to set specific generic voting policies that they will then implement automatically for me.

[walamaking]

Have you ever voted before? Assume 10 questions per company. Exposure to S&P 500 would mean 5,000 questions to answer. I don't know what the general stats are, but some proxies I've seen have 20+ questions.

Now, you will most likely be uninformed about most of the decisions that need to be made, which lead to your 2nd point about default options suggested by the index fund manager. But that just circles back to Bogle's points in the article. Also, with index fund costs at rock bottoms, good luck getting quality research into your voting options.

[pedrocr]

> But that just circles back to Bogle's points in the article. Also, with index fund costs at rock bottoms, good luck getting quality research into your voting options.

The alternative is active funds where you're already paying for exactly the same thing plus a bunch of compensation for underperformance to people who pretend to know what they're doing. Paying a research team is cheap in comparison and once funds are at <0.10% expense ratios making them cheaper isn't that big of a market advantage anyway. A good research team and interface would definitely make me pick a 0.10% fund over a 0.05% one for a life-long investment career. If I'm reading the numbers in the article correctly at the scale of Vanguard that's a cool billion dollars a year to provide research and systems.