Investing Fads

Tulips!

All the rage if you were in Holland in 1682.

Anything.com, if you were, well...pretty much anywhere on Earth in 1997. The world was all about mutual funds in the 1960s, when professionals regularly beat the market (and yeah, uh, not so much today).

Are index funds' popularity today a fad, or a Thing? Time will tell. Fads are short-lived investing destinations that usually don't have a real raison d'etre. Their economic rationale is usually ambiguous at best, and they're sold as a product or a group too aggressively by brokers, bankers, and would-be interested parties.

What's not a fad? Well, if you believe that the world will get more crowded (and some mass outbreak of measles or weaponized ebola or a good ol' fashioned nuking doesn't wipe out a third of us), then you'd believe in buying real estate. Or really any scarce resource that lots of people want. Not a fad.

Pez dispenser collection? Yeah, that was a fad for 8 minutes in 1995. Hello, eBay. We heart our Popeye.