Active management has long been the foundation of a well-functioning stock market.  Many of the brightest minds on Wall Street have dedicated their careers to separating the good ideas from the bad, doing deep research to allocate capital to the right themes, sectors and companies.  The by-product for the rest of us has generally been an exceptionally healthy stock market with relatively efficient asset prices.

“Watch out, you might get what you’re after” was an anthem sung by a frantic David Byrne in the Talking Heads classic, Burning Down the House.  When the song was released in the mid-1980s, Wall Street was also in a frantic mode of its own. In the ensuing decade, it began providing its clients with more technology to better access markets and more products to replicate the strategies being employed by institutional investors.