So yes, without even digging in to the data, saying that 0.6% of active managers beat the market by more than expenses seems like an absurd number. I mean in your own feature, you clearly outlined the outperformance of the active funds of the most index-focused of them all, Vanguard. So if Vanguard can do it, surely another, say, 6% of active managers (and that would be 10 times the number purported by the study) must be able to pull it off.

Again, I feel a little silly sitting around here and defending active management, which is pulling off a tremendous fleecing job on the investing public. But hey, at least they're not as bad as hedge funds. I promise to go in there and read that "The World is Flat" article and be open to the pancake theory of active management.

I actually like an earlier Hulbert offering covering a Ken French paper on the COST of active management:

I like it because it is nearly identical to a featurette I put together years ago on a Web site I worked for. I did a study showing only excess fees paid in the mutual fund industry (but I did it much better than Ken French if I dare say so). Where he subtracts the fees of the Vanguard Total Market fund, I broke down all active funds by asset class, with a low fee index fund benchmark in each of 20 or 30 distinct asset classes, multiplied assets in each active funds minus the differential of the fund expense ratio and its low fee benchmark index fund, multiplied out, added them all up, and presto poof! $32 billion (if I remember correctly), NOT including institutional, etc., that Ken French included.

I then took it one step further and we built a "Wastemeter" that showed "the amount of money mutual fund investors have wasted so far this year" and ran it right on top of the site (along the lines of the national debt tracker in New York).

We thought that was pretty clever.