“the industry's advice to "keep it passive" really amounts to: you aren't smart enough to take even the obvious stuff into account, and not only that, we aren't either."
ADAPTIVENESS MATTERS
The conventional wisdom in investing is that you can't time the market, shouldn't try, and will only hurt yourself if you do. Parts of the industry have elevated this into a cult of passive: whatever happens, just keep buying.
There is some logic here. Market action is mostly noise. People tend to overweight irrelevant datapoints, inappropriately extrapolate recent events, and pay high transaction cost drag when tunrover is too high. Trading too much destroys capital.
But “people often respond badly to useless information” is NOT a justification for “you should never respond to useful information.”
Ignoring all incoming information when deciding what to own is clearly crazy. For example, if you really took the industry's advice to keep it passive to heart, you would have been buying bonds with negative nominal yields for years in Europe. This wasn't difficult to understand at the time. There are clearly certain datapoints that should matter enough to inflect investment behaviour. And the world is changing faster than ever before - you've got to be able to react.
I view adaptiveness as a design choice with trade-offs to navigate, just like any other design choice. How much and how frequently you change your positions should depend on:
1) How materially the information changes your assessment of future returns and risk.
2) What it costs to change the portfolio relative to the expected benefit.
Reacting appropriately to new info does not require having an opinion on every headline.
Of course, the hard part is establishing that the information you are paying attention to actually helps. Making adjustments is a lot easier with LIQUID, capital-efficient instruments (like futures) in your toolkit. And clearly "less is more," in the sense that under-reacting will tend to draw your results closer to a still-acceptable passive-like outcome, while too-much overreacting will nearly guarantee permanent capital destruction.
Still, I think you can do far better than passive alone, by paying attention to the basics, like: risk conditions, capital efficiency, awareness of macro factors, momentum, carry returns, and the like.
Finally: the industry's advice to "keep it passive" really amounts to "you aren't smart enough to take even the obvious stuff into account, and not only that, we aren't either."
That's wrong and it really shouldn't take alot to do better. The key is a disciplined methodology for judiciously turning evidence into positions, with enough humility and restraint to mostly leave the noise alone.