The greatest risks in markets are often the ones that don’t look like risks at all. Passive investing – now controlling well over 50% of US equity fund assets and more than $20 trillion globally, up nearly 20x since 2000 – has fundamentally altered how investors define risk. What used to mean the potential loss of capital has quietly been replaced by something far more benign: tracking error.
Is quality broken? This has been a recurring question in our recent conversations with investors as quality has meaningfully underperformed over the past several quarters.
