Passive investment is a kind of investment that doesn’t require significant time from your or anyone to manage. You just put your money in it and let it earn income without having to spend so much time monitoring or managing it. Examples of these are bonds, guaranteed income, real estate and index funds.
Active investment normally requires you or your financial manager to spend time monitoring and managing them. The purpose is to maximize the profit that you can get from your investments so time is spent in researching and reallocating them. An example of this is when you are trading stocks on a frequent and regular basis. In order to identify which stocks are good to buy or sell, you will need to do considerable research about the company and its industry and come up with a conclusion whether it’s good to buy or sell it. This is something that full time money managers do and I will not recommend for you to do.