Active Management’s Persistent Failure: A 2025 Perspective (opens in new tab)

Charles Ellis’s classic work, Winning the Loser’s Game—first published as a book in 1985, building on his landmark 1975 Financial Analysts Journal article— highlighted a sobering reality for investors: only about 20% of actively managed funds—those attempting to beat the market through security selection or market timing—were able to generate a statistically significant alpha, and that was before factoring in taxes.