Komfie Manalo, Opalesque Asia: Participants at the latest Opalesque 2017 Netherlands Roundtable offered some critical reflections on the surge of passive investing. Pieter de Vries Robbe, Director of Operations and Business Development at Capstone Investment Advisors thinks that that being passive is basically surrendering to fear.
"If you're not willing to take personal risk, if you don't have courage to stand up for what you believe in, you end up investing passively," Robbe told the Roundtable and added, "And unfortunately, courage nowadays is a scarce good. As a result, we see a very pale landscape with a dominant herd mentality. This has eroded the investment spirit that the Dutch institutional market once had."
He admitted that the investment industry was partly to blame for what happened in the financial crisis - but at the same time, the sector is also in the process of killing an industry that was successful in the Netherlands for hundreds of years.
Robbe added, "Daily, I hope to find signals of the pendulum swinging back. Unfortunately, I haven't seen clear positive signs."
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