Investor Attention and the Low Volatility Anomaly
One of the big problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), was that it [...]
Explaining the Demand for Higher Beta Stocks
The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) indicates returns should go up linearly as beta increases (in other words, risk and return are positively related). However, [...]
ETF Product Development: Past, Present, and Future
On October 1st, 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T to the world. The power of the Model T was that it democratized the automobile [...]
Assessing the Potential Market Impact of Passive, Short-volatility, and Low-volatility Strategies
The market has recently experienced record low levels of realized volatility and the VIX™ (volatility index) has fallen to historic lows. Moreover, the incredibly popular [...]
Active Share: Does it Predict Fund Performance?
The Holy Grail for mutual fund investors is the ability to identify in advance, which of the active mutual funds (or ETFs nowadays) will outperform [...]
“Passive” Investing: Theory and Practice in a Global Market
Purely passive investing is theoretically plausible but practically impossible. That said, the practical implementations can often be "good enough." As a theoretical index investor, you deploy [...]
Trust, but Verify: The Potential Problems of Blind Investing
Nobody can predict the future, but there is a chance the blind purchase of broad-index portfolios will come to an abrupt and potentially chaotic end when the [...]
Chinese Market Anomalies – The Factor Killer?
The Oracle of Omaha just commented on the Chinese stock market in this year's Berkshire's annual meeting: ...Markets have a casino characteristic that has a [...]
Rebalance Your Portfolio? You are a Market Timer and Here’s What to Consider
In this piece I examine various way in which an investor can think about their active market timing decisions, often labeled with the innocuous term [...]
Active Managers Should Love Passive Investing–It Makes Them Better!
Blaming the disappointing performance of active management on the exponential growth of passive indexing (defined here) is not a new idea. However, a recently published paper in the Journal of Financial Economics,(3) provides a new and notable take on the continuing debate. In a surprising turnabout to Mr. Odey’s comment, the authors of the article find that actively managed funds are more “active”, charge lower fees, and produce higher alpha, when faced with more competitive pressure from low-cost passive index funds.
Active Versus Passive Investing: Can we End the Confusion?
I've noticed something profound the past few years: depending on your audience, the definition of active investing and passive investing is different. To a financial [...]
Active Versus Passive for the US and the Canadian Markets
We all hear about the massive move away from active to passive in the US market. We also hear arguments that passive may eat the [...]
Treasury Bills Outperform Most Stocks — Say What???
Each morning we peruse a variety of research sites to see if there is anything exciting, new, and intriguing. Rarely does one find something that [...]
Active Fee Over Time: Retail and Institutional Trends Over Time
We've been focused on understanding how to communicate the concept of active fee to the broader investment community. Active fee is an important concept because it [...]
Earth to Passive Investors: Lunch is Never Free.
Imagine the following scenario: A strategy that outperforms everything. An ability to scale the strategy at no costs. A beating drum highlighting the infallible logic [...]
The Expensive Lesson of Closet Indexing: Avoid Low Active Share and High Expenses
The promise of active investing is compelling: the opportunity to earn higher risk-adjusted returns! And paying a fee to an active manager--who is doing something unique--can make sense. And [...]
How Portfolio Construction Affects Value Funds
Value investing is an investment philosophy that has been extensively discussed and examined at least since the days of Ben Graham, who popularized it as [...]
Have benchmarks made us bad active investors?
Curse of the Benchmarks Vayano and Woolley A version of the paper can be found here. Want a summary of academic papers with alpha? Check out [...]
How Portfolio Construction Affects Momentum Funds
We have already documented the returns to generic momentum investing strategies. Within the fund marketplace, many investors focus on fees and less on process. For example, Morningstar highlights the fees [...]
How to Pick Smart Beta ETFs
Investors are probably unaware of the price they are paying for the "active" piece of Smart Beta. Using a simple framework, we show that buying a Smart Beta product at 45bps is equivalent to paying 5bps for a generic passive exposure and 138.33 bps for the active exposure! How many investors are aware that "low-cost" smart beta products might be implicitly charging fees that are equivalent to many active mutual fund fees?