Re:“Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading
by skybrian on Saturday April 10, 2021 @09:27PM
(#26766819)
If you’re holding then you’re neither buying nor selling, and so you don’t participate in setting the price at all, until the day you sell. Only the people (and machines) that are trading have any say. So it seems like it wouldn’t be the percentage of free-riders that’s an issue, but rather that the size of the active market shouldn’t be too small.
Index funds need to rebalance so they’re not just holding, but it seems like for passive investors, they approximate holding? Maybe the rebalancing would tend to exaggerate the effects of active trading?
With more and more assets going into passive funds, when might we actually see them owning such large fractions of companies that a play like this is possible? Google suggests that 10-15% of the SP500 is owned by mutual funds. Presumably there's going to be an inflection point where this becomes problematic.