The Changing Current

March 18, 2025 | Zach Houston-Read, CFA, Research Associate

The impressive strength of U.S. equities in recent years has drawn significant investment from both domestic and international investors, but a closer look reveals a shift in how investors are attaining exposure to the asset class. The chart above illustrates the cumulative net asset flows for various U.S. equity investment vehicles since 2009 and indicates that a growing number of investors are embracing passive strategies. To that point, more than $2.5 trillion has flowed from active to passive management in the last 15 years, with most of the dollars having been directed toward ETFs.

There are many factors that have contributed to this trend. First, mobile brokerage platforms and improvements in technology have made investing more convenient and cheaper for retail investors, with thousands of low-cost products now available that track major stock indices like the S&P 500. Second, many institutional investors have reallocated portions of their U.S. equity portfolios to passive strategies to save on fees, while seeking higher returns via active management in other asset classes like private equity. Additionally, many active U.S. equity strategies have struggled to keep pace with the broad market. Specifically, just 15% of active U.S. large-cap managers have outperformed the S&P 500 over the last decade due a small handful of companies (i.e., the “Magnificent Seven”) having been responsible for an outsized portion of U.S. equity market returns in recent years. This trend also aligns with what is often referred to as the “paradox of skill,” which states that as the absolute level of skill in a space increases, the relative skill among the players in that space often decreases. While this framework has been applied to everything from the NBA to chess, it may also be partly responsible for the decrease in the return premiums earned via active management in the U.S. equity market. If true, this trend poses interesting questions related to whether similar alpha compression will occur in fast-growing spaces like private markets.

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