Growth strategies have outperformed value strategies in recent years. Is growth’s recent performance an anomaly when we look at it in a long-term context? The answer: It depends on what you mean by a growth strategy.

Low-volatility indexes have been attractive to some investors, mainly due to their defensive and low-risk characteristics.

While used extensively by active managers as part of their security-selection decisions, the growth factor has been largely left out of the factor-index investing landscape, at least in its simplest form. This paper explores why and offers a way to capture this factor with a systematic, rules-based approach.

2018 marked the 10-year anniversary of the MSCI Minimum Volatility Indexes. Launching just prior to the global financial crisis, which caused sharp equity market falls, and the indexes’ behavior “out-of-sample” since launch have led to adoption by a large number of asset owners and the indexes’ serving as the basis for a wide range of ETFs that have gathered significant assets. Here, we contrast 10 years of live data with the previous 10 years of backtesting, investigating changes in the...