How Can Active Investors Survive in a Passive World? Get Small

(Related: Actively Managed Funds Disappoint in 2017 With Some Bright Spots)

Take a look at the numbers in the Greenwich-Alger study, which was conducted from September to November of last year. Of the 91 “key decision makers” questioned, more than half of the institutional investors said they’d increased their allocations to focused strategies in the previous 18 months, and the same amount expected their interest to grow over the next two years. For intermediaries, about a third upped their contributions to smaller strategies, and more than 60 percent expect their enthusiasm to rise.

(Related: Vanguard Launches Its First Actively Managed US ETFs)

The logic behind the shift is that these tightly focused portfolios hold the stocks the investment managers most believe in, which will induce outperformance. In addition, these smaller groups should deviate further away from indexes than so-called benchmark huggers, which have large holdings that all but match the index they’re chasing. If the strategies are more differentiated — what asset managers call “active share” — they also should have a better chance of outperforming passive indexing. Or so the thinking goes.

“Your probability of outperforming the market is going to be much greater with 10 stocks than with 1,000, because once you’re at 1,000 you’re essentially the market,” Tambone said. “I want high conviction, and I need to have high active share, and if I have high conviction and high active share, there’s a better probability I’ll have a tracking error that I’m looking for. And when I combine those three data points, I improve the probability that I’ll have high alpha.”