[saltcured]

I think the point is there is no such thing as "neutral default". There has to be some weighing to define the market and distribution of your investments. Any act to prune the whole world economy into an actionable list is, in effect, a kind of weighing.

Existing indexes represent tried-and-true weighing methods that have are considered to summarize a market in some useful way. Index funds leverage that on purpose to not do a bunch of bespoke analysis. Not using one of these indexes puts you back in the realm of a managed fund with its own active research and forecasting...?