普徕仕投资组合专家Ramon MARONILLA：主动管理的挑战和机遇

任何人都可以在市场上进行投资，但要持续跑赢市场则需要高水平的技能、经验和投资纪律。这正是普徕仕在市场上长期立足的独特之处——主动管理。我今天演讲的主题是“主动管理的挑战和机遇”。

首先请先允许我介绍一下普徕仕这个公司。我们坚持主动管理的投资方式。我们专注于为客户提供卓越的回报。关于我们公司有三点重要信息：我们在主动管理方面有87年的投资历史。我们的投资办公室涵盖在全球17个市场，拥有真正的全球视野。我们在全球有超过800名投资专业人士，他们都致力于为客户提供卓越的回报。

我们今天的目标是讨论现在投资市场中最大的争议——被动管理与主动管理。我们的重点将是美国市场的趋势，因为它们通常指示着全球市场的方向。

我们将分三部分进行讨论。首先，我们将分析被动管理的兴起。接着，我们将通过分析促使被动管理发展的因素来构建讨论框架。最后，我们将通过提出一个强有力的理由来支持主动管理。

在美国，被动投资的市场份额在过去30年中迅猛增长，从2%增加到今天的50%以上。大部分被动资产都在ETF中，ETF在发达市场中也日益受欢迎。

在股票领域，被动投资从主动投资夺取了大量市场份额，占据了主导地位。主动投资流出了1.6万亿美元，而被动投资则增长到了2.9万亿美元。

被动固定收益投资未像被动股票那样增长，因为实际上没有真正的被动收入。这是因为管理人不会复制指数中的每一只债券，因为这样做成本高、不可行，甚至是不可能的。例如，巴克莱全球综合债券指数有超过22,000个发行。因此，管理人主要通过分层抽样来复制指数的风险因子，这导致了跟踪误差。

从直观的角度来看，我们应该有充分的理由相信，主动投资方法会表现更优。简而言之，主动管理人会做出战略或战术决策，投资于盈利和增长前景更好的公司。而被动管理人只是选择跟踪市值加权指数。因此，我们可以预期主动投资在长期内业绩更佳。

然而，由于近期有利于被动投资的趋势，主动投资的优势有所减弱。这些宏观驱动的趋势包括低通胀时期非常宽松的各类货币政策。

2008年危机爆发后，各国央行削减了全球的政策利率——在某些情况下降至0%，同时中央银行在公开市场购买债券，这被称为量化宽松。低利率和充裕的流动性结合，为股市上涨创造了完美的条件——从2009年3月到2024年6月，标普500指数回报率达到了987%。我们还看到更高的相关性、更少的分散性和更高的市场集中度。

在过去的十年中，我们在FAANG（Facebook、Amazon、Apple、Netflix、Google）股票中看到了这一点。最终被七巨头所取代——Apple、Microsoft、Alphabet、Amazon、Meta、Nvidia和Tesla。Magnificent 7极大地推动了股市回报，减少了这些股票提供的分散化收益。当这些股票表现良好时，这有帮助；但当它们表现不佳时，会带来严峻的挑战。

需要明确的是，七巨头的财务表现非常出色，但历史表明，最终竞争、创新、大数法则或政府干预会对这些股票造成压力。

这导致了极端的市场集中度。标普500指数中最大的10只股票占该指数的37%，而其余的490只股票占63%。

成熟的主动管理人尽力实现分散和审慎风险管理，他们面临着将大量资本分配给这些已占主导地位的公司的压力，从而减少了他们的投资机会集。机会集的缩小削弱了主动管理的优势。

然而，我们相信未来主动管理将具有显著的超额回报潜力。首先，促进被动管理的宏观经济条件已经发生了结构性转变：由于产业回流、保护主义上升和向绿色能源的过渡导致的通胀上升，加上更高的政策利率和债券收益率。

美国股市的韧性使估值变得不那么有吸引力，特别是对七巨头来说。股票几乎是以完美为定价，为对抗下行风险提供了很少的缓冲。在这种环境下，我们预计相关性将正常化，导致具有强劲基本面的公司与较弱公司的分化加剧。这些因素都非常有利于主动管理获得超额回报。

历史表明，成熟的主动管理人通常在集中市场中表现良好。例如，在90年代的互联网泡沫期间，前10只股票的综合权重峰值最高达到25%，但随着科技公司市值锐减，这一比例迅速下降。主动管理人在此期间显著超越市场，正如您在这一幻灯片上看到的。类似的情况也出现在2000年代的日本资产价格泡沫和1980年代的新兴市场行情中。在这两种情况下，被动资金流入，泡沫的形成，但在泡沫破裂时，最成熟的主动管理人表现最佳。

总结:

1. 被动投资在低通胀、低收益率和充裕流动性的背景下实现了爆炸性增长。

2. 强劲的美国股市表现、更高的集中度和相关性是更有利于被动投资的条件。

3. 但我们显然已经处在了不同的市场环境中，经济和市场条件的正常化会有利于最好的主动管理人。

My talk will focus not just on investing, but investing in way where the manager truly adds value. Anyone can just invest in the markets, but it requires a high degree of skill, experience and discipline to consistently outperform the market. And that’s exactly what sets T Rowe Price apart and what we’re truly known for – Active Management.

The topic of my talk is “Challenges and Opportunities for Active Management”.

Let me first begin by introducing T Rowe Price. Active management is all we do. We are laser focused on delivering superior returns for our clients.

Three key things about us: We have an 87-year-old track record in active management. We have a truly global perspective through presence in 17 markets. We have 800 investment professionals worldwide, all focused on delivering superior returns for our clients.

Our objective today is to tackle the biggest debate in investing – passive vs active. Our focus will be trends in the US markets which tend to be indicative of the direction for the rest of the world.

We’ll be doing this in three parts. First, we’ll be looking at the rise of passive. Next, we’ll be framing the debate by analyzing the factors that have led to the growth of passive. Finally, we’ll conclude by making a compelling case for Active.

In the US, passive’s market share has exploded over the past 30 years, from 2% to over 50% today. Most of passive assets are in ETFs, which are also growing in popularity in developed markets.

In equities, passive equities have dominated, taking massive market share from active. Active has seen an outflow of $1.6 trillion, while passive has grown to $2.9 trillion.

Passive FI has not grown as much as passive equities as there’s really no such thing as truly passive income. That’s because managers don’t replicate every bond in the index as it would be costly, impractical and even impossible to do so. For example, the Barclays Global Aggregate Bond index has more than 22,000 issues. So managers seek to replicate index risk factors mainly through stratified sampling which contributed to tracking error.

From an intuitive standpoint, we should have strong reason to believe that an active approach would outperform. Put simply, active managers make strategic or tactical decisions to invest in companies with better earnings and growth prospects. Passive managers simply choose to track a market cap weighted index. So you would expect active to outperform over time.

However, the advantages of active has diminished somewhat by recent trends that have favored passive. These macro driven trends include a low period of inflation that has led to extraordinarily loose conventional and unconventional monetary policy.

After the onset of the crisis in 2008, CB’s slashed worldwide policy rates – in some cases to 0% while central banks purchased bonds in the open market, known as quantitative easing. The combination of low rates and abundant liquidity created the perfect conditions for equity markets to rise – from March 2009 to June 2024, the S&P 500 returned 987%. We also saw higher correlations, less dispersion and higher market concentration.

We saw this in the FAANG stocks in the past decade (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google). Eventually replaced by the Magnificent 7 – Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. The Mag-7 overwhelmingly boosted equity returns, reducing the diversification benefits these stocks offer. This helps when these stocks perform well, but pose a significant challenge when they perform poorly.

To be clear, the financial results of the Mag-7 have been extraordinary, but history suggests that eventually competition, innovation, the law of large numbers or government intervention will weigh even on these stocks.

This has resulted in extreme market concentration. The largest 10 stocks in the S&P 500 have a 37% weight in the index, while the rest of the 490 stocks have a 63% weight.

Skilled active managers striving for diversification and prudent risk management are under pressure to allocate substantial capital to these already dominant firms, thereby reducing their opportunity set. Narrower opportunity sets diminish the advantages of active management.

However, we believe there is a compelling case for active to outperform going forward. First, the macro conditions that have favored passive have undergone a secular shift: higher inflation due to onshoring, rising protectionism, transition to green energy; higher policy rates; higher bond yields.

The extraordinary resilience of the US equity markets has only made valuations less attractive, particularly for the Mag-7. Equities are pretty much priced for perfection, providing little cushion vs. downside risks. In this environment we expect correlations to normalize, resulting in greater divergence between companies with strong fundamentals vs. the weak ones. All this are highly conducive to outperformance of active.

History shows that more skills active managers typically performed well coming out of concentrated markets. During the dot-com bubble of the 1990’s for example, the combined weight of top 10 stocks peaked at 25%, but fell sharply as tech companies plummeted in value. Active managers significantly outperformed during this period as you can see on this slide. Similar patterns occurred in the Japan asset price bubble of the 2000s and the emerging markets rally in the 1980s. In both cases, flows surged into passive as bubbles formed, but the most skilled active managers performed best when the bubbles burst.

In summary:

1. Passive has seen explosive growth in light of low inflation, low yields and abundant liquidity.

2. Strong US equity performance, rising concentration and higher correlations are conditions that have benefitted passive more than active.

3. But we are clearly in a different environment and the normalization of economic and market conditions should benefit the best active managers.