considerations are challenging traditional definitions of both active and passive investing. Against this backdrop, we present a new edition of the CFA-VBA Journal with the theme The Return of Active Investing?
Active or passive investing? For many years, the choice appeared clear-cut. Investors favouring active management relied on fund managers' expertise and conviction to outperform the market, while passive investors focused on broad market exposure at the lowest possible cost. Today, however, the investment landscape is evolving rapidly, and the traditional distinction between active and passive investing is becoming increasingly blurred.
markets, credits en small caps.
De Wtp verbreedt de rationale voor actief beheer. Naast verwachte alpha telt ook de aansluiting bij beleidsdoelen, risicohouding, cohorten, duurzaamheid en uitlegbaarheid. Dit artikel analyseert wat deze verbreding betekent voor de keuzes van pensioenfondsbesturen en laat zien waarom ook een operationeel passieve portefeuille strategisch actieve keuzes kan bevatten. Wat verandert de Wtp aan de beoordeling van actief beheer, op welke niveaus speelt dit en wat vraagt dit van pensioenfondsbesturen?
Tatjana Ulićević, PhD, spent more than 20 years in systematic equity and risk management at Optiver, ING Investment Management and Shell Asset Management Company (SAMCO). At SAMCO she co-designed and chaired the Capital Markets Meeting, a cross-asset forum that brought teams across capital markets into a single debate before “Total Portfolio Approach” became widely discussed. In this interview she reflects on what that experience taught her about culture, governance and judgment in the Total Portfolio Approach (TPA), which a growing number of Dutch pension funds are adopting as they move into the new pension system.
Annebeth Roor-Wubs recently defended her PhD at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Her research focuses on how social and environmental impacts
can be measured and managed in investment portfolios. One of her papers shows that investment professionals use three different cognitive frames to understand and act in
implementing sustainable investing.
Each time the active-versus-passive question appears resolved, the market finds a new way to reopen it. For the better part of two decades, the empirical record has appeared to favor passive strategies because implementation costs are lower, outcomes seem more predictable, and the historical underperformance of the average active manager after fees in the most liquid equity market segments. For instance, over the 10 years ending December 2025, only 11% of active managers in Europe and 21% in the US survived and beat their benchmarks or passive rivals (Morningstar, 2025). This has led many to jump to conclude that active management is a relic of a less efficient era.
Is active management dead? By the end of 2025, the median active manager had posted the worst 3-year excess return in over twenty years. Yet outperformance has not disappeared everywhere. The Peer Group Success Score, as elaborated on in this article, points to wide differences across regions: in Japan, active management clearly adds value, and in Emerging Markets active choices are still rewarded, while in US Large Cap almost no approach worked, apart from low-tracking-error quant strategies. Market concentration, not manager skill, may be the real story of this cycle.
In recent years, few debates have been as prominent in finance as the apparent tension between shareholder value and stakeholder capitalism. In Grow the Pie, Alex Edmans offers a compelling and largely convincing resolution: companies can create greater longterm profits precisely by serving employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and shareholders well. Rather than treating stakeholder interests as a constraint on profitability, Edmans argues that purposeful business can expand the total value created, the “pie”, from which all stakeholders ultimately benefit.
Customizations driven by sustainability preferences are widely used to create indices that lie somewhere between two ends of investing style – active and passive. Previous research has shown that different sustainability-driven customizations lead to different active risk-return outcomes. This paper shows that not all exclusions are created equal. The impact of sustainability-driven exclusions depends not only on how much of the benchmark weight is removed, but also on which companies are excluded. Excluding a few benchmark-relevant large-cap companies can have a greater impact on tracking error than excluding a similar aggregate weight spread across many smaller companies. We further show that index methodology matters. The choice of index construction approach can materially affect benchmark replication effectiveness, highlighting the importance of research-driven index design choices, ongoing monitoring and regular evaluation of whether the methodology remains aligned with the index’s objectives.
Passive investing is compelling, but incomplete. Real-world investors face changing market regimes, fat-tailed risks and pathdependent wealth outcomes that are not fully captured by standard models. These features create a role for active management focused on adaptation and robustness: dynamic risk control, regime awareness and protection against severe losses. But they do not make active management easy. Markets remain hard to forecast, costs matter and apparent skill may reflect hidden tail risk. The case for active management is therefore real, but uneasy.
- Google translation of a column by Can Yilmaz in Financial Investigator - The conventional method of cyber risk management is under pressure. Time pressure, mind you. After all, how do you arm yourself against the latest generation of AI models, which can find and exploit vulnerabilities ever faster?
- Column in Financial Investigator - De gangbare wijze van cyberrisicobeheersing staat onder druk. Tijdsdruk welteverstaan. Want hoe wapen je je tegen de nieuwste generatie AI-modellen, die kwetsbaarheden steeds sneller kunnen vinden en uitbuiten?