luke wilson
The Living Force
_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwkjqGd8NC4
One to watch if you are a bit bored really. It's a documentary about the financial services industry that mainly looks at the arena of investing. Within the arena of investing they concentrate a huge chunk within the work fund managers do. Fund managers in this case are the people who play around with your retirement fund amongst other things e.g. from a work-based pension scheme that you pay into on a monthly basis if you work for the man.
The documentary mainly looks at the principles between active investment strategies i.e. a pooled pension fund for example paying a fund manager to manage it actively and try to deliver returns above the market vs a passive investment strategy where the fund isn't managed as actively beyond choosing a strategy; it's linked to indexes that track the market i.e. the fund aims to perform at the level of the market over the long term.
It's called "How to win the loser's game" because investing is a "loser's game" generally because it's guesswork really. That's what they say in the documentary! For every person that wins, another has to lose somewhere else because it's a zero-sum game ultimately. Furthermore, there is no way of telling who is going to win and who isn't if an investment strategy is active. You win some, you lose some over the long term. So the documentary essentially is saying that a passive strategy is better than an active one due to lower running costs i.e. the investor doesn't have to pay exorbitant charges for the time and supposed expertise of the fund manager. So in summary they say a passive strategy is better because
a) It's cheaper to run. Active strategies are labour intensive and the labour i.e. fund managers charge exorbitant fees. Once the fees have been taken into account, any return of what you would get above the market if they performed well is wiped off.
b) They track indexes which are designed to follow the market i.e. computers are hard at work!
Basically, it's not a bad documentary to kill 1 hr 20 minutes but it's not really something that will transform your life or give you deep insights for the world of tomorrow given the financial house of cards is about to come crashing down!
One to watch if you are a bit bored really. It's a documentary about the financial services industry that mainly looks at the arena of investing. Within the arena of investing they concentrate a huge chunk within the work fund managers do. Fund managers in this case are the people who play around with your retirement fund amongst other things e.g. from a work-based pension scheme that you pay into on a monthly basis if you work for the man.
The documentary mainly looks at the principles between active investment strategies i.e. a pooled pension fund for example paying a fund manager to manage it actively and try to deliver returns above the market vs a passive investment strategy where the fund isn't managed as actively beyond choosing a strategy; it's linked to indexes that track the market i.e. the fund aims to perform at the level of the market over the long term.
It's called "How to win the loser's game" because investing is a "loser's game" generally because it's guesswork really. That's what they say in the documentary! For every person that wins, another has to lose somewhere else because it's a zero-sum game ultimately. Furthermore, there is no way of telling who is going to win and who isn't if an investment strategy is active. You win some, you lose some over the long term. So the documentary essentially is saying that a passive strategy is better than an active one due to lower running costs i.e. the investor doesn't have to pay exorbitant charges for the time and supposed expertise of the fund manager. So in summary they say a passive strategy is better because
a) It's cheaper to run. Active strategies are labour intensive and the labour i.e. fund managers charge exorbitant fees. Once the fees have been taken into account, any return of what you would get above the market if they performed well is wiped off.
b) They track indexes which are designed to follow the market i.e. computers are hard at work!
Basically, it's not a bad documentary to kill 1 hr 20 minutes but it's not really something that will transform your life or give you deep insights for the world of tomorrow given the financial house of cards is about to come crashing down!
