Fight Club Round 1 - Active versus Passive Investing

The New Fund Order

16-05-2022 • 1 hr 22 mins

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Welcome to Fight Club! For Season Two of the NFO podcast, step beneath the surface to debate the difficult issues facing asset management. Time to take this underground!

Each round is a panel debate of two teams, one captain per team plus 2 team members.

Active versus Passive 🥊 💥 Round 1

Active captain Simon Evan-Cook will be joined by Lucy Walker, CFA and Ben Conway 💥
Passive captain Mark Northway will be joined by Robin Powell and Larry Swedroe 👊

Equal time allocated, rapid debate. Each team will be allocated circa 25 minutes total time, monitored by JB. When each team is talking then time will automatically count down. If the team runs out of time then the remaining time is handed to the opposing team.

Audience: Fund selectors, family offices, multi-managers, advisers, allocators, gatekeepers and distributors. We appreciate that there is already a high volume of podcasts and that fund selectors are heavily marketed to, however we believe that within this niche there is little competition and significant demand for content of this type. Given this gap I believe that it is the time to use the format of a podcast to bring together the community to discuss hot topics that are all too often led by partisan echo chambers and only discussed in opposing vacuums!

1) Can anyone truly be a passive investor? Aren’t we all different shades of active? Few buy a naive portfolio, whether it is market cap, factor investing, systematic strategies, SmartBETA?

2) Have we reached or will we reach “peak passive”? Did passive just get lucky with Big Tech or is the success of index investing just common sense?

3) Thinking the behavioural biases at play, is the concentration of assets around Star Managers the best argument for Active or Passive?

Fighter Bios

Captain Team Passive: Mark Northway, investment manager at Sparrows Capital, NED and consultant.

Larry Swedroe, Principal and Director of Research at Buckingham Family of Financial Services.

Robin Powell, Journalist, investor advocate, financial educator & content consultant. Head of client education at RockWealth, Editor for 'The Evidence Based Investor' blog, Executive Director of Regis Media and Ember Television.

Captain Team Active: Simon Evan-Cook, Manager of Multi-Asset, Multi-Manager Funds & Citywire Columnist. Blogs at nevermindthesilverbullets.com. Fund Manager, Downing Fund Managers.

Lucy Walker, Giving fund research teams the tools they need to succeed | Founder at AM Insights | Deputy Chair at Aurora | NED at HINT | Co-CEO at Changing Digital.

Ben Conway, Head of Fund Management at Hawksmoor Investment Management.

Teaser trailer 📺 here: https://youtu.be/riH7fopTN-U

Credits: Session recorded in Microsoft Teams. Sound effects by Zapsplatt.com. Images by Pixabay.co

Produced by New Fund Order


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