Passive Management

Passive management (also called passive investing) is a financial strategy in which an investor (or a fund manager) invests in accordance with a pre-determined strategy that doesn't entail any forecasting (e.g., any use of market timing or stock picking would not qualify as passive management). The idea is to minimize investing fees and to avoid the adverse consequences of failing to correctly anticipate the future. The most popular method is to mimic the performance of an externally specified index. Retail investors typically do this by buying one or more 'index funds'. By tracking an index, an investment portfolio typically gets good diversification, low turnover (good for keeping down internal transaction costs), and extremely low management fees. With low management fees, an investor in such a fund would have higher returns than a similar fund with similar investments but higher management fees and/or turnover/transaction costs.

Passive management is most common on the equity market, where index funds track a stock market index, but it is becoming more common in other investment types, including bonds, commodities and hedge funds. Today, there is a plethora of market indices in the world, and thousands of different index funds tracking many of them.

One of the largest equity mutual funds, the Vanguard 500, is a passive management fund. The two firms with the largest amounts of money under management, Barclays Global Investors and State Street Corp., primarily engage in passive management strategies.