This paper deals with the ongoing rise of index (passive) investing on the U.S. large-cap equity market and its manifestations. We have constituted two scenarios of the 1990–2021 market shift: implying the reduction of efficiency in the first and the continuous increase of efficiency in the second one. Analysing a wide array of 2 173 managed assets, we have found that passive investments´returns significantly outmatch the active ones. Our results also indicate that active investments offered significantly reduced volatility and the risk-adjusted returns were free of significant differences. This implies no change of intrinsic market efficiency so far, along with overall support for the efficient market hypothesis in the target sample.