Mark Urquhart on passive investing

The notion that equity indexes are somehow risk-free states has to my mind always been a dangerous fallacy which has been amplified by the rise of passive investing. Actually, all three of the significant market crises which my career has contained — technology, media and telecoms (TMT), the financial crisis and now the coronavirus — have been linked by so much damage being done to particular parts of the index that it demolishes the thesis that index investing can diversify away such risk.

~ Mark Urquhart, money manager at Baillie Gifford in Edinburgh, Scotland, "Opinion: The hidden risk in your S&P 500 index fund," MarketWatch.com, July 17, 2020