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Re:Everything Is Crazy and the Markets Aren’t Freaking Out by legitster on Monday October 16, 2017 @10:41PM (#15488259)
Maybe we'll finally find the argument against index funds: when the majority of market power is essentially in auto-pilot, it can't steer out of a crash.

It's crazy to think that we can look at the market and opine over the lack of animal spirits.

Re:Everything Is Crazy and the Markets Aren’t Freaking Out by ThrustVectoring on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @12:21AM (#15488644)
Index funds are going to expand until they're a big enough segment of the market that they're worth trying to exploit through predatory strategies. Eg: getting a long position in a stock and taking action to get it included in an index and forcing index funds to buy into your position. Or the opposite - short position and de-listing a stock. Or more complicatedly, manipulating your public float in order to squeeze market-cap indexers.

The last one needs explanation. Suppose indexers think they should own 10% of your company. Issue stock, and "sell" that stock in a self-dealing manner at current market prices. Indexers now should buy stock, since your company is bigger on paper (more shares outstanding at the same price). In the degenerate case, >90% of the stock isn't actually available for sale on the public markets, and the indexers have to buy literally more shares than they can buy.

Note that this pattern of strategies happens organically. Whenever there's a population filled with agents that pay costs to enforce rules, there's a superior local strategy of free-riding on their rule enforcement, since defectors cannot operate in a enforcer-heavy environment. This also is what'll cause a drop in index funds - wide-scale losses due to fraud and prices temporarily disconnected from fundamentals.

Re:Everything Is Crazy and the Markets Aren’t Freaking Out by princeb on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @12:50AM (#15488741)
> indexers think they should own 10% of your company

i like to believe indexers are not that easily fooled.

broad market indexers (think 2-5k stocks like the russell) normally use an approximation portfolio that holds significantly fewer assets in order to minimize transaction cost. the correlation between a 500-asset portfolio and a 5000-asset portfolio is something like 98%, maybe more. a lot of replication portfolios don't even bother with the underlying nowadays, they just load up on cash settled equity swaps with the dealers and let them deal with the basis.

and narrow market indexers track indices that won't bother including corporates with tiny floats.

Re:Everything Is Crazy and the Markets Aren’t Freaking Out by shimon on Monday October 16, 2017 @11:05PM (#15488352)
There's an interesting argument that index investing helps take the dumber investors away from active investing, making the animal spirits smarter on average.
Re:Everything Is Crazy and the Markets Aren’t Freaking Out by crabasa on Monday October 16, 2017 @11:16PM (#15488401)
I think it's less about animal spirits and more about granularity. If I only own index funds, I am forced to panic sell the whole market. If I instead own 10-20 stocks, I'm only affecting a fraction of the market.

In the dot com bubble, not everything popped. Many stocks went up as people fled tech and went into "safer" sectors. So it does seem that broad index hegemony has the potential to exacerbate a nasty crash.

Re:Everything Is Crazy and the Markets Aren’t Freaking Out by rhexs on Monday October 16, 2017 @10:44PM (#15488275)
Inevitably the markets will crash, new articles will come out detailing the "death of index funds" after five plus years of low or negative returns, capital will flow out due to the new index fund "retirement crisis", and we'll be back to where we started.

Stay the course.

Re:Everything Is Crazy and the Markets Aren’t Freaking Out by legitster on Monday October 16, 2017 @10:51PM (#15488299)
I was thinking in aggregate - their potential on the economy as a whole.

As an individual, they are obviously the best bet. But I'm just trying to read in some possible externalities.