From the corridors of academia comes a paper surely considered blasphemous — or at least bad PR — by hedge fund managers: It raises questions about whether hedge funds are worth their fees. Written by Kenneth French, a finance professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business well known for his research on markets, the working paper, “The Cost of Active Investing,” suggests that passive investors — those who put money into index funds — do better over the long haul than active investors like hedge funds.
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