At Blackrock, machines are rising over managers to pick stocks
It is interesting, but not all that surprising that ineffective management strategies are slowly being flushed out of the market.  That human stock picking is pretty bad, is widely known, sorry for the pickers, but I'm sure there are other things that they can do to actually create instead of destroy value--reallocating their labor is a huge benefit for society.<p>The real questions for me with this transition though are:<p>-With all these people passively investing, are we going to see reduced competition within industries because you don't have active, non-diversified, significant, institutional shareholders to drive aggressive competition against other industry participants?  In fact, we may get the opposite where institutional shareholders don't want to see aggressive competitive moves because it is profit destroying for them on both sides (aggressor spends money to return less than the defender loses in profit--lose, lose for investor in both companies win, win for the consumers of this industry).<p>-How good is price setting if there are less and less actively managed funds?  Are there new inefficiencies that are created by all this passive investing?<p>-Where aren't the machines taking over?  Obviously, something like replicating an index is a great exercise for automation and programming.  But truly maximizing return?  Who is successfully, consistently beating the benchmarks with active strategies automated or not?