Indexing isn't everything
From The Wall Street Journal
Vanguard is known as the index fund king, and its Vanguard 500 fund is about to pass Fidelity's Magellan as the world's biggest. That performance has overshadowed the Vanguard's 50 actively managed funds, which recorded a medicocre performance last year. Managed funds attracted less than a quarter of the new money flowing into the company, and Vanguard needs those funds to attract new assets in order to keep its costs low. Also, there are signs that the index fund boom has peaked. At the end of last year, a few turbo-charged tech funds passed the Vanguard 500 as the country's best selling fund.

Love letter to Stansky
From The Wall Street Journal
Bob Stansky's success at Magellan shows that the market can be beaten consistently. In the process, he's disproving some of the excuses "active" fund managers give for their funds' inability to keep up with market benchmarks. For example, the "too big" theory holds that after a fund reaches a certain size it bogs down under its own weight, because bigger chunks of stock are harder to trade at good prices. At $100 billion, Fidelity hasn't slowed a bit. And the "narrow market" excuse says that managed funds can't beat the S&P 500 because that index's strength is the result of a heavy concentration of a few dozen technology stocks. Stansky beat the S&P last year without heavy investment in tech stocks.  

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