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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

If you went to a financial advisor 30 years ago, they would have said "give me your money and I'll make you a portfolio". He/she would then have bought most of the S&P 500 or some other exchange in a diversified manner buying equities and bonds. They would have shifted around your allocations ever so slightly every quarter, buying some stocks and selling others. But really, the strategy was to buy and hold. Bonds were similar.

Is that not indexing under another name?

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You're getting downvoted, but this is exactly what happens with most active managers these days. Seriously, go to a local branch of a big bank, start a managed investment account, they'll give you a 1-1.5% fee portfolio and tell you about how well diversified and well organized it is for your risk level. And it is both those things! But dig into the investments and you'll see... Vanguard, Vanguard, iShares, Vanguard, Vanguard, iShares, Blackrock, Blackrock, iShares, etc.

Sure there are traders on wall street looking to beat the index funds with manual trading, and these guys will always exist. But most active managers these days are just buying index funds and slapping on an useless fee. This is why when I pulled my money out of my bank's managed investment account and into a Vanguard account, I didn't suddenly change a portion of the market from active to passive investing, I just removed an unnecessary 1.25% fee that got me nothing and did nothing positive for the economy.

The products banks sell to punters are never good value compared to direct investment in ETF's iShares or what have you.

He would not buy “most of the s&p 500”. He would pick stocks to (try to) do better than the s&p 500. Indexing was not common 30 years ago.

http://s18674.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Index-marke...

Indexing was very common, it just wasn't called indexing. It was called "active investing" but the reality is it wasn't as active or as smart as people think it was. It was very similar to today's indexing where you would funnel your money into the Facebook, Google, Amazon's of the day and collect a fat fee. This is how index funds work today, when you invest in a S&P 500 index fund it's really weighted towards the huge hitters. The dirty secret of active investing is every active investor had some kind of index-like fund going that constituted a large percentage of their portfolio.

That graph is precisely my point, it's all about how we're measuring what it means to be an "index". You could engage in index-like behavior but be an "active investor". Indexing is just a label.

Of course the market as a whole has been always indexing by mathematical necessity. Indexing is just a label, true, but it happens to be the label applied to investing exactly in proportion to the weight of each stock in the index. As opossed to "active investing".

But the subtler point is that your index fund is mostly invested in a few big companies,plus noise. AAPL ($1T) itself is 3% of the entire US stock market ($30T).

The first index fund was in 1975, and people did scoff at it and call it "un-American". But that was over 40 years ago. By the time you're thinking of, index funds were common, even if not as large a portion of the market as today. I'm not sure exactly how much Vanguard had taken in by 1988, but I read[1] that their growth rate was about 53% in the early years, so their first fund that started with about $11 million would have been one of the larger ones by then, around $1 billion or more. By that time they had a dozen competitors.

[1]https://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/lib/sp19970401.html

Their AUM was $56bn in 1990.

https://about.vanguard.com/img_files/who-we-are/remarkable-h...

I guess one can debate how "common" is "common". Maybe indexing was common in the late eighties, but now it's two orders of magnitude more common.

Something can be common without being a large percentage, or a majority, of the market.

When Vanguard's fund had $11 million and was the first and only of its kind, I think it's fair to say indexing was not common or popular. When they had competitors and there were billions of dollars being indexed (keeping in mind a billion dollars used to be worth more than now), I think it's reasonable to say investing in index funds was growing common.

By analogy, a small percentage of the national or global population used the internet circa 1996, but it was becoming a common activity in the sense that millions were discovering it.

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