I don't know whether the most telling image to visualise active management today is the nightmare scenes from Terminator after the machines have taken over, or Apple advert for the launch of the Mac in 1984, when we see a room full of guys dressed in grey staring at a screen (before a girl in a nice pair of red shorts breaks it up).

I think the second image is the right one - but unfortunately there's no sign of the girl in the red shorts at the moment.

Let me explain: the aim of active management is to beat the indices. Passive management, on the other hand, replicates the indices. It is taking up more and more space because it can replicate perfectly and cheaply. And every time an end-customer withdraws money from an active manager and puts it into an ETF, the diversified equities bought by the manager are sold and the stocks in the index are bought instead. And as most of these indices are weighted by market capitalisation, this money goes massively into large caps (Apple, Microsoft etc...).

This becomes a kind of vicious circle, because no one - including active managers - can avoid these stocks. So we all end up buying the same stocks, simply because they're in the index. We're really starting to look like the guys in grey in the Apple advert.

So it's high time we started a revolution against machines! For the moment, I can't think of a girl in red shorts who would fit the bill - today's young revolutionary is Greta Thunberg, but that's not quite right - but all the resources of active management need to come together. And that includes analysts.

And there's the rub (not the girl's bottoms, she's in shorts).

No, the problem is that analysts, who should be cooking the management of listed companies like Maigret, Columbo or Mike Hammer, aren't doing that.

For example, on Tuesday evening Netflix published.

How many analysts are on the call?

5? 4? ... Zero in fact.

There was no analyst. They could ask their questions in advance by email and the financial director would answer them during the presentation.

So imagine if Columbo, when questioning his suspect, was told to ‘Ask your questions in writing and we'll prepare answers for you to read later’.

How much do you think the clearance rate has dropped?

Netflix did not publish its 10-Q on Tuesday either. The 10-Q is the detailed financial report that has to be sent to the SEC. We won't have it for a few days yet. But that hasn't stopped most analysts from giving new price targets for the share, as early as Tuesday evening. Some are even releasing them before the presentation.

So it's not really analysis any more. And yet there are questions. Why, for example, did the impairment charge for Netflix's content catalogue fall by $200m over the year? Normally, the opposite would be true, because the content portfolio is bigger than it was a year ago. Or why did the company produce $500m less content this quarter? We'd like to see a real debate, hard questions, tension, drama, body language - in short, what you get in a good Netflix series!

On the contrary, we have nothing. We have a few stocks, a sharp rise in share price after a session, but we're never quite sure where it's coming from (see Robin Wigglesworth's article in the Financial Times). All the active managers who don't have Netflix feel lousy. Some of them are going to get calls from their clients telling them that they are switching to passive management...

So I appeal to the analysts' guild: that its members boycott companies that do not play by the rules. No target price should be published without reading the financial report.

So if we get back to real management, we'll be able to fight passive management more effectively.

Because if it really wins, no more managers, no more analysts, no more market.

It will be boredom, ‘the boredom that even the gods feared’, as Nietzsche put it.

Don't give up!

Market and portfolio focus

Behaviour:

From 12/01 to 19/01, the fund lost 0.8%, while the S&P 500 gained 1.2% and the CAC 40 lost 1.2%.

We'll take last week's results and start again: BioNTech and Galapagos continued their winning ways, with negative contributions of 0.3% and 0.2% respectively.

For Teleperformance (+0.2%), opinion seems to be changing. Analysts are starting to revise their views and buyers are flocking to the door.

Lines:

Following the publication of Schlumberger's good results, we finished building up our line of Tidewater as mentioned last week. We now have 4% of the fund. At the same time, we carried out two other transactions. Firstly, we invested 2% in Solaredge, one of the biggest suppliers of inverters for photovoltaics, whose share price has fallen from $300 in early 2023 to $70 today. Secondly, we increased our position in the US 2-year yield curve. We have 20%.