Traditional investment thinking posits that alpha depends on the active decisions of portfolio managers. The search for alpha is daunting, however, because even the best analysis can be upended if the market draws a different conclusion. In addition, geopolitical and macroeconomic events can change the market environment without warning.

Last year, 157 new ETFs and ETNs were launched in the United States - one-tenth of the total of 1,546, according to ETF.com. But how many of these new funds can be called real "innovations"? Take the hottest area of the market: what many investors call "smart beta", "strategic beta" or "factor investing". These are index strategies that take bets against the market in an attempt to either deliver risk-adjusted outperformance or to capture some...

Individual investing has become a prominent part of the investment landscape. Whether for retirement, wealth management, estate planning, or other purposes, the enormous growth of individually directed assets has stirred increased interest in and attention to the way individuals try to set and meet investment goals. Unfortunately, most individuals fare less well than institutional investors when it comes to the choices they make and, most important, their ability to achieve overall financial...

Benchmarks are practical tools used by investors at every stage of the investment process, including policy portfolio creation, asset allocation, fund selection, performance evaluation, and product creation. But despite their central role in the investment process, a comprehensive discussion of benchmarking standards or best practices has not been addressed in recent industry literature.This paper aims to provide a framework for benchmark assessment. The framework is drawn primarily from...

An accumulating body of empirical research has found positive gross excess returns from exposure to risk factors (or risk premia). Our study was commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Finance to explore factor strategies, through the lens of risk premia indices, for large funds. The paper examines equity risk premia, such as value, size, low volatility and momentum, focusing on return, risk, and investability. For portfolios of large scale, we construct risk premia indices which have...