Reflections on the 50-year Anniversary of the Index Fund

Fifty years after the birth of the index fund, passive investing now accounts for more than $20 trillion, equal to the entire gross domestic product of the US, and is today a force reshaping markets, finance and even capitalism itself in myriad subtle but pivotal ways.

Join Russ Wermers, Endowed Chair in Finance and Director of the Center for Financial Policy at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business, as he sits down with Robin Wigglesworth, FT’s Global Finance Correspondent, to reflect on the rise and future of the index fund and discuss Robin’s latest book, Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever.

Trillions chronicles the history of the index fund and the incredible true story of the iconoclastic geeks who defied conventional wisdom and endured Wall Street’s scorn to launch the index fund revolution. Mohamed El Erian, Chief Economic Adviser of Allianz and author of When Markets Collide and The Only Game in Town, has described the book as “a tour de force” and The Wall Street Journal cast it as “magisterial, delightfully written” and a “rip-roaring yarn.”

Read more about Trillions…

Speakers:

Russ Wermers
Paul J. Cinquegrana ‘63 Endowed Chair in Finance & Director, Center for Financial Policy Smith School of Business, University of Maryland

Russ Wermers is Paul J. Cinquegrana ‘63 Endowed Chair in Finance and Director, Center for Financial Policy at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland at College Park, where he won a campus-wide teaching award during 2005 and a Krowe Teaching Award (within the Smith Business School) during 2013. His main research interests include studies of the efficiency of securities markets, as well as the role of institutional investors in setting stock prices. In addition, he studies and teaches quantitative equity strategies, and is currently researching microfinance institutions in Thailand. Most notably, his past research has developed new approaches to measuring and attributing the performance of mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds, as well as devising winning strategies for investing in these funds. Professor Wermers also studies the investment behavior of these asset managers, as well as the impact of their trades on stock markets. His papers have been published in leading scholarly journals, such as The American Economic Review, The Review of Financial Studies, The Journal of Financial Economics, and The Journal of Finance. His article on mutual fund “herding” and stock prices (Journal of Finance, 1999) won the NYSE Award for the Best Paper on Equity Trading in 1995. His coauthored article on mutual fund performance was a finalist for the Smith-Breeden Award for the Best Paper in the Journal of Finance during 2006/2007. Professor Wermers consults for the hedge fund, pension fund, and mutual fund industries. He is coauthor of a book on the latest scientific approaches to performance evaluation and attribution of professional fund managers, written for academics and practitioners (published in December 2012). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in December 1995.

Robin Wigglesworth
Global Finance Correspondent, Financial Times
Author, Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever

As the global finance correspondent at the Financial Times, Robin Wigglesworth focuses on the biggest trends reshaping markets, investing, and finance more broadly across the world, with a particular focus on technological disruption and quantitative investing, and writing longer-form features, analyses, profiles, and columns.

He was previously the FT’s US markets editor, spearheading its coverage of financial markets and asset management across the Americas, deputy head of FastFT, capital markets correspondent, and Gulf correspondent. Before joining the Financial Times in 2008 he worked at Bloomberg News.

Robin’s latest FT articles include The dangerous private capital party; The ten trillion dollar man: how Larry Fink became king of Wall St; Inside the cult of crypto.

Qualifications:

• CFA Institute PL Credit Hours: 1 Credit
• CFA Institute Competency Framework Skill: Industry Awareness + Investment Strategy & Process

Registration:

• CFAW Member: FREE
• Non-Member: $25

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