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Weekend reading: Passive investors should bring Larry Swedroe to a knife fight

Good reads from around the Web.

Perhaps it’s because it was the first film I saw at the cinema with my own money – and without my parents – but I often recall the life lessons taught by Crocodile Dundee, not least when I first encountered a bidet in Paris 20-odd years ago.

Alas, when I was mugged (with an axe!) in the late 1990s I was insufficiently armed to create this famous moment from the movie:

I thought again of this scene when I read Larry Swedroe [1] demolishing an argument in favour of active investing over at ETF.com [2].

After gently cutting the argument to shreds, Swedroe concludes:

The bottom line is that there’s no real cyclicality in the percentage of active managers who outperform, at least not when you measure things properly.

And there’s nothing presented in the article that should convince you that using actively managed funds is the winning strategy at any time.

Sorry, active fund management industry.

To mix my movie memes…

…you’re going to need a bigger boat.

From the blogs

Making good use of the things that we find…

Passive investing

Active investing

Other articles

Free brain training of the week: Blogger Ermine [17] spotted that the Open University has just started a free online course entitled Managing My Investments [18]. It runs for six weeks.

Mainstream media money

Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view these enable you to click through to read the piece without being a subscriber of that site.1 [19]

Passive investing

Active investing

Other stuff worth reading

Book of the week: I read an interesting article [37] this week on innovation and the rise of medieval knights, which riffed heavily on sections from Warlords, Inc [38] – a new book about what entrepreneurs can learn from despots. Really!

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  1. Note some FT articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”. [ [43]]