ZH: "Indexation Is A Socialist Way Of Allocating Capital"

A rare, profound essay on Zero Hedge:

"The role of financial markets is to evaluate in real time the marginal return on capital of different assets. This is done through a ‘price discovery mechanism’, with the ‘right price’ found out through a system of constant trial and error. To discover this price calls for a community of active money managers, each doing his or her due diligence before buying and selling. This price is a function of the return on capital and of the expected growth rate of this return. It has nothing at all to do with the size of the investment under consideration. What’s more, if the price of an asset has been going down for the ‘wrong’ reasons, then active money managers should buy more of it. Over time this process will help to stabilize the system.

Active money management is essentially a ‘mean reversion’ strategy. That’s not so for indexation. In the indexation process, there is no attempt at price discovery. The only thing that matters is the relative size of the asset: the bigger the market capitalization, the more an investor should own. This means if the price of a large asset goes up more than the market as a whole, indexers have to buy even more of it.

Thus indexation is a momentum-based strategy."