Name: David Booth on Active Managers vs. Indexing
Uploaded: 2026-09-18T21:38:00Z
Duration: 4 min 38 s
Description: If active managers aren't beating the market, what's their purpose? David Booth, founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors, weighs in.

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If active managers aren't beating the market, what's their purpose? David Booth, founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors, weighs in.

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David Booth on Active Managers vs. Indexing

Do you really believe there are no active managers who can beat the market over time?

Oh no, that'd be pretty extreme. And just so we don't know how to identify them before the fact. You know, if you look at, suppose the hypothetical orangutans throwing darts at a dart board, you know, one orangutan and a thousand will beat the market every year, 10 years in a row, if they're throwing darts at this listing of stocks. That's just by chance. Well, fewer active managers do that, you know? And so it's difficult to separate skill from luck. Some of the managers out there that have great numbers, it could be due to luck, good luck, and there could be some great managers out there that have underperformed just due to bad luck. It just, we can't. Quantitative methods aren't good enough to separate out skill from luck in all of this.

But aren't people like Warren Buffet or Stanley Druckenmiller, I mean, they have these long-term records. So can you just definitively say, "Well, I guess these are a couple people who really have shown that it's not just luck."

Well, I mean, their numbers are so good, I would give them a chance. They may be the exception. But what I'm getting at is when people talk about people that have beaten the market, have good long-term numbers, they always come up with the same names. We ought to have a lot more names than just the ones, the two or three or four that people kinda consistently come up with.

Or maybe the fact that there are only two or three or four, but make your point then, right?

Yeah, right.

Right.

Then I ask people, "Well, how much money have you given them?" Well, I go, "If you think they're so great, why don't you give them your money?" And anyway, those are kind of the conundrums that I deal with every day.

So do these active fund managers who, for the most part, let's say 95% of them, it's probably higher than that, don't get the job done for investors, do they serve any purpose in the marketplace, making it more efficient? Do they help the people who are doing indexing? Do they serve any function at all besides taking people's money?

I think you're onto something there. I mean, even though it may be random noise that they're dealing with, the kind of the wisdom of crowds, if you get enough trading volume where everybody has similar information and so forth, it kind of, prices kind of settle at fair levels. It's kind of a wisdom of crowds effect.

So it's great having those people in the market.

Right. And I mean, by extension, I guess the question would be what happens if it's only David Booth's computers and Vanguard's computers, if it's only, you know, indexing and indexing with a brain, if you will, in the markets and there are no more active managers? What happens?

Well, the good news is it doesn't look like that's going to happen. And I'll give you, you know, there's been a tremendous growth in indexing over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Now, index funds don't trade much, if at all. And so if now we go from zero to half of the market being indexed, a poor guy like me might say, "Well, I would expect trading volumes maybe about half as much as they were before." In fact, it's just been just the opposite. As we've had a growth in indexing, we've had a similar growth in trading volumes. You know, that's a real conundrum. The one explanation would be that people have shifted away from trying to pick individual stocks and are now focused on trying to pick market sectors or the market itself. Index funds are the ideal timing vehicle because you can buy the whole market with one trade. So that's pretty cool. So the data suggests to me that what people are doing now is getting in and out of markets and so the trading volumes stay high. As long as the trading volumes are staying as high as they are, I don't think there's much risk that we have to worry about.