In his book, Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment, Swensen recommends with all assets that investors use passive index mutual funds.
While active investment involves an asset manager making investments with the aim of outperforming a benchmark index, passive investment requires an asset manager to replicate the benchmark index by incorporating the constituent assets in similar proportions (weights) and thereby matching the returns of the index.
Financial services firms that rely on brokers and advisors face a threat from online channels which are accumulating assets faster than full service firms, partly because of the growing popularity of passive investments such as index funds and ETFs, he added.