Mr. Howard mentions that: "Collectively, active equity delivers no value to its investors and, in fact, extracts value from them."

Of course *taken collectively* this must be the case, by simple arithmetic, since active managers can make profits only at the expense of other active managers, right? I guess that I had presumed that this was widely accepted in accordance with Sharpe's work on the subject ("The Arithmetic of Active Management," 1991 and "The Arithmetic of Investment Expenses," 2013).

Pedersen ("Sharpening the Arithmetic of Active Management," 2016) adds a small glimmer of hope that *taken collectively* active management can add value, but he doesn't propose that this will be much help to investors, as identification of outperforming managers in advance is next to impossible.