Active Management

Active management is usually used with investment companies offering mutual funds and similar types of investments. They hire groups of Type-A money people in fancy suits. These portfolio managers and analysts drink a lot of coffee, read a lot of money-related reports and forecasts, and look at a lot of charts to try to figure out how to pick stocks and investments that outperform their return targets.

Passive management, BTW, is the opposite. Usually it's a thing with ETFs and index funds, where a bunch of stocks are picked because they are all linked to a specific area (like tech, for example). Nobody spends time trying to figure out what to buy. Instead, the investments are sometimes rebalanced to make sure they still match up what they're supposed to represent. One money guy with a computer can usually handle investments in a passive management style.