Financial Planner Life Podcast Active vs Passive investing: A Pointless Debate for Financial Planners?
Oct 29, 2025
Andrew Spence, co-founder of Aspen and former fund researcher with an engineering background, built a model portfolio service to prioritise client outcomes. He discusses why active vs passive is a false binary and the importance of asset allocation. He critiques risk profiling and evidence-based claims, weighs gold, Bitcoin and private equity, and explains building simple, client-first investment tech.
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Build Portfolios Around Goals Not Risk Buckets
- Aspen was built from first principles rather than copying existing MPS offerings, prioritising goal-based portfolios over simple risk-profile buckets.
- Andrew emphasised creating a toolkit of portfolios mapped to client goals instead of 'fill the questionnaire → match portfolio' workflows.
Design Tech That Teaches Clients Their Portfolio
- Do design intuitive tech that bridges financial-planning language and client understanding using an interactive discovery journey.
- Andrew built 'portfolio discovery' to walk advisers and clients through goals, wrappers, risk, and create portfolios the client actually understands.
Active Vs Passive Is About Decision Rights
- Andrew reframes active vs passive as 'decision-making powers' versus none and argues asset allocation, not security selection, drives 80–90% of returns.
- He favours a middle ground: low-cost passive building blocks plus selective active allocation and flexible asset allocation.